people before process

a compassionate
approach to healthcare
improvement
  • Home
  • Themes
    • Preliminaries
    • Committed
    • Active
    • Responsive
    • Energetic
    • Focused
    • Uniform
    • Leading
  • Solutions
    • Individual
    • Team
    • Business Case
    • Organisation >
      • Patient Experience
      • Staff Experience
      • Leadership Development
      • Decision Making
      • Reputation
      • Efficiency
    • The Hospital Game
    • Governors
  • Concepts
    • The CAREFUL organisation
    • The Three Circles
    • The Elephant and the Rider
    • Implementation Cliff-face
  • Elements
    • Behavioural Guidelines
    • Breakthrough Leadership
    • Coaching and Buddying
    • Complaint Handling
    • Compliment Handling
    • Customer Service
    • Dealing with Negativity
    • Delivery Teams
    • Do-Say Don't-Says
    • First or Best
    • Induction
    • Kindness and Compassion
    • Leadership Rounds
    • Leadership Training
    • Meeting Effectiveness
    • Measuring Leadership
    • Organisational Management System
    • Patient Forums
    • Performance Boards
    • Process Documentation
    • Publicising First or Best
    • Recognising Great Performance
    • Staff Forums
    • Staff led recruitment
    • Staff Surveys
    • Talking up
    • Telephone Follow-up
    • Thank you letters
  • Book
    • Get the book
    • About the Author
    • Translations >
      • Gujarati
      • Mandarin
    • Reviews
  • Help
    • Untitled
    • About Us
    • Ambassadors
    • Partners
    • Clients
    • Contact us
    • Forum
  • Blog
  • Feedback

The CAREFUL approach in larger organisations

The CAREFUL approach was designed, from the outset, to be a complete development approach which you can use across any size of organisation. We have created documentation to guide the setup of a such a programme as well as documents which describe the 28 elements.

Here is an outline of some of the steps you may need to consider if you want to use the CAREFUL approach in your organisation.

Engage the board
  1. You should ask the board (the senior decision-making team, be that a board of directors or an executive team) to review the  CAREFUL organisation diagram and concept note. You may want to encourage them to read the book.
  2. The board should also spend an hour together answering the questions in the organisational questionnaire and ensure they have agreed an overall CAREFUL score.
  3. The board will need to commit to a  CAREFUL programme - or one of the subsets (see below). This will require a require a business case since much of the implementation will require some resource allocation. We recommend that you review the Business Case documentation
  4. Agree the scope and style of the programme.

Gather regular staff feedback
  1. Ask all your staff members to answer the Cultural Questionnaire anonymously and collate the results. This will give you and your leadership colleagues a more exact idea  idea of where you need to focus your efforts. You will need to repeat this exercise every six months.
  2. Set up a regular Staff Barometer to supplement this and monitor progress.

Setup Delivery Teams

If you are going to implement all 28 elements you will need to set-up eight delivery teams - one for each theme.
  1. You will need to choose a suitable leader for each of these delivery teams and populate each team with suitable members.
  2. Our suggestion is that you do NOT set up the teams up all-at-once, but stage their introduction, starting with Preliminaries and then roughly in the  the order C-A-R-E-F-U-L. 
  3. Each team leader and their team members will need to be trained in the Meeting Effectiveness techniques. 

Please refer to the Programme Setup Checklist and other documentation on this page for more information, suggestions and help.

Useful documents

Key interventions
File Size: 349 kb
File Type: pdf
Download File

Stages and Timings
File Size: 348 kb
File Type: pdf
Download File

Engagement Workshop
File Size: 101 kb
File Type: pdf
Download File

Approach and Style
File Size: 98 kb
File Type: pdf
Download File

Roles and Structure
File Size: 167 kb
File Type: pdf
Download File

Programme Checklist
File Size: 106 kb
File Type: pdf
Download File


Getting Help

You may find that, because of its scope and complexity, setting-up and running a CAREFUL programme can be daunting. It can also be resource intensive.

Along with our partner organisations and ambassadors we provide coaching, training and support - both in person and through telephone support - for people wishing to undertake the programme.

Please contact us if you want to learn more about how we can support you.

    Ask a question

    If you have a specific question about the content of this page, please let us know and we will do our best to answer.
Submit

Search material on this site

Creative Commons Licence
All material in this website is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. (In brief, this means you can use it all, for free, providing you attribute it to us - and don't try to make any money out of it). Downloading any material from this website implies acceptance of this licence.

Comment on this page


Contact Us    -    About Us   -   Our Privacy Policy   -   Licence Terms