Dear Workforce: How Do We Effectively Measure the Impact of Training and Development?

The measurement of training effects is a sociological challenge, even under the best conditions and the most generous budgets. Someone first needs to champion the development of procedures and methods you’ll wish to follow.

Q Dear Workforce:
How do I develop a useful score card for our hospital’s training and development?
—Keeping Score, director of education and organizational development, health care, Stamford, Connecticut

A Dear Keeping Score:
Keep in mind that measurement of training effects is a sociological challenge, even under the best conditions and the most generous budgets. Hospitals have a huge training challenge: from doctors and other medical specialists with continuing-education requirements to entry-level jobs such as food service. The key to progress and credibility are to keep the measurements practical, and set realistic expectations for them. Your program will sell itself better if you start with clear, modest, reliable measurements, and grow from there on a priority basis.

My one biggest and best recommendation: anyone in a medical field would do well to read The Checklist Manifesto, by Atul Gawande. The book is widely acknowledged for getting to the crux of failure modes in many modern settings—especially, in complex delivery systems such as hospitals.

To support your hospital’s goal of becoming a “learning organization,” appoint an internal champion to develop procedures and methods that are linked to training, and that reflect the significant paradigm shift that Dr. Gawande's work chronicles. Johns Hopkins dropped its IV line infection rate from 11 percent to zero in a year, saving eight lives, 43 infections and $2 million. The stories go on from there. If you are just getting started, forging a link between methods, training and results could produce other significant benefits for your organization. And wouldn’t it be great to be able to say it all started in, and sustained by, your training department?

SOURCE: Harold Fethe, organizational consultant

Home