Taking the Guesswork out of Goal-setting

Session Description: Developing goals of the Infection Prevention Program can often feel like guesswork if the Infection Preventionist is not equipped with the right tools or strategies to identify and estimate target goals. Setting goals for performance improvement is an important aspect of the Infection Prevention Program to demonstrate efficacy of prevention initiatives, improve patient outcomes and promote patient safety. Carefully defining the metric and calculating the magnitude of the target change will have significant influence on the future success of achieving performance improvement goals. The current session will review methodologies for determining performance improvement goals, including: external benchmarks, percent-change compared to institutional baseline and statistical methods like standard deviation, distribution percentiles and statistical process control. Examples will be based on common challenges in Infection Prevention, such as reducing hospital-acquired infections, improving hand hygiene compliance and preventing exposures to communicable diseases. The presentation will cover how to perform the calculations, when to use specific methodologies, understand limitations of different approaches, identify the benefits or potential pitfalls and make decisions to inform planning of future prevention initiatives. Participants will observe how the choice of metric and method to calculate the target change can influence future performance towards achieving goals. Additionally, the presentation will discuss communicating and engaging with stakeholders. In this way, Infection Preventionists can be set up for success to plan program goals that demonstrate data-driven decision making and highlight successes of Infection Prevention Programs with achievable and meaningful performance improvement goals.