The Nudge Project

In a retrospective audit conducted at a community hospital, it was found that a significant portion of patients were given antimicrobials to treat urinary tract infections. Only 12% of the prescriptions were concordant to published guidelines. The antimicrobial stewardship committee wanted to improve this to provide safer outcomes for patients. Our job was to start the conversation in order to start to work on this problem.

We decided that a key component of the Nudge project was to raise awareness and allow teams to self-identify solutions in a co-design workshop. We wanted to frame the problem in a positive manner to avoid the blame culture that has penetrated the healthcare environment.

To introduce participants to the problem and workshop objectives, we created a two-minute video that first celebrated the teams previous successes, saying “we achieved this together”. We then presented the problem and concluded the video saying “we can change this together”. Now that our audience was aware of the problem, we began the co-design workshop. At the end of the workshop participants were given tote bags that had the encouraging message from the video on one side and the congratulatory message on the other.

The co-design workshop helped healthcare providers identify their own challenges and opportunities to deliver better patient outcomes regarding urinary tract infection management. Further, the diverse healthcare team that was present for workshop created a group of partners committed to the success of the project.