I love the idea of turning a negative approach to improvement in health care — looking for problems — on its head. Appreciative inquiry, a process of focusing on a group’s inherent strengths and fostering positive interactions among group members, is one way of fostering change with a positive approach. Positive deviance (PD) is another.
Basically, PD involves identifying what’s working and usual local solutions owned by the people involved to make improvements. According to Leading Change in Healthcare: Transforming Organizations Using Complexity, Positive Psychology, and Relationship-centered Care, a fascinating book I’m currently reading, PD was first developed as a way to address malnutrition in poor communities — by looking for children who were healthy despite the limited resources, learning what the mothers of these children were doing differently (the “deviance”), and creating opportunities for other mothers to practice these different behaviors.
What if we were to apply positive deviance to the problem of clinician burnout? What might that look like?
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