Readiness for change: Understanding your current practice against the Essentials of Safe Care​

Assess how well the Essentials of Safe Care drivers are embedded​

Understanding current practice​

Once you have assessed readiness for change and have an awareness of the environment and conditions for change in your area, you are ready to progress with assessing how well the Essentials of Safe Care drivers are currently embedded in practice. ​

The understanding current practice tool will enable you to identify where you may want to focus your improvement efforts. ​

We recommend that you: ​

  • Use the scale to consider how well each secondary driver is embedded into day-to-day practice​
  • Record any data sources that you can use to provide evidence / assurance​
  • Use the completed assessment to inform your priority areas for improvement​

Interpreting your self-assessment of current practice​

As with the Readiness for Change assessment, we recommend discussion with a diverse range of stakeholders be used to inform your assessments. You may find it helpful to look at the evidence, examples and training resources on the Essentials of Safe Care web pages. ​

Understanding current practice tool

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Link to Understanding Current Practice Tool

Prioritisation – impact / effort matrix​

Once you have a good understanding of how the Essentials of Safe Care are currently embedded and any gaps in practice, you are ready to identify your priorities for improvement. A prioritisation matrix is one available tool that can support you to understand how to balance effort and impact. A prioritisation matrix template is available on the QI zone on TURAS .​

Further tools are available from the Scottish Approach to Change

Using what you have learned about current practice around the Essentials of Safe Care:​

  • have a discussion with your team and create a list of improvements you would like to make​
  • consider the potential impact, and the level of difficulty, of making these improvements​
  • arrange them on a prioritisation matrix as a guide​
  • identify your first area of focus for improvement​
  • develop your improvement plan.​
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