Implementing and evaluating the effects

In this phase, teams put in place the agreed interventions to change practice. The time these take will vary substantially, for example a planning intervention may take just 30 minutes, or if a mindfulness course is offered to staff to help support their emotional wellbeing to perform certain tasks (automatic motivation), this may last for 8 weeks.

Some top tips to help implement strategies in your teams may be:

• Having clear timescales, to avoid drift
• Leadership from within the team with responsibilities to deliver tasks
• Agreed review dates, to help keep up momentum
• Keeping in mind Kotter’s Eight Steps for organisational change, especially the importance of communication about your intervention, and creating short term wins

We have found it can be helpful to visually display communications in an area where all team members and service users can learn about the programme being run.

Evaluating the effects

Finally, we need to know to what extent the strategies have made a difference and what more support needed to help implement changes. We use the same methods as in the exploring phase, such as using routinely collected data, interviews, focus groups, observations or questionnaires.

Summary and next steps

Overall, these modules have introduced you to taking a behavioural approach to organisational change, specifically in helping teams adopt new models of care.

Thank you for taking part, we hope this has been a useful introduction. It may be useful to now take a note of what you plan to do next to take this learning forward: evidence suggests that the behaviour  change technique of action planning, including what, where and when you will take action, helps people achieve their goals.

We wish you best luck in your next steps in taking a behavioural approach to organisational development. We offer training courses and other kinds of help in this approach: for more information on how we can support you in this work, please just get in touch.

For the latest news and events on new models of health and social care, subscribe to the NHS England’s Integrated Care Bulletin.