Pre-emptive Innovation Infrastructure for Medical Emergencies: Accelerating Healthcare Innovation in the Wake of a Global Pandemic

Making hospitals innovative: Macro-level policy to sustain micro-innovations in healthcare

Successful innovation clusters are notoriously difficult to establish, and many attempts fail. How can we go about designing such systems reliably? We describe how ecosystems can be strengthened through grassroots bottom-up efforts that empower user and community innovation, as opposed to economic policies that dictate innovation. Specifically focusing on the healthcare industry, we advocate that community hospitals which constitute 90% of all hospitals in Canada are the ideal setting for such community innovation efforts. We investigated the distribution of innovation output from hospitals over the past 13 years and found a decrease in predominance of major teaching hospitals, supporting the potential role for community hospitals in this space. We categorize different types of innovations and recommend institutional policies that can sustain bottom-up, micro-level efforts. Such policies could improve and enhance the development of micro-innovations and the creation of health innovation clusters.

Kirkpatrick's evaluation of the effect of a nursing innovation team training for clinical nurses

AIM

This study aims to design a 100-h training programme for nursing innovation teams and to evaluate the effect of this training programme using Kirkpatrick's model.

BACKGROUND

The innovative capability of nurses is a powerful driver for the development of the nursing discipline, and it is currently at a low to medium level in China. Innovation competency development has become a research trend in nurses' in-service education, but only changes in nursing innovation behaviours before and after training have been evaluated. The cascading, continuous assessment tools are rarely used.

METHODS

This is a quasi-experimental research design: pretest and posttest design. Totally, 61 clinical nurses from Hangzhou Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine were enrolled for innovation training. This innovation team training programme consisted of a 36-h theoretical training phase and a 64-h collaborative training phase. The four levels of Kirkpatrick's model, that is, reaction, learning, behaviour, and result, were applied for the evaluation together with questionnaires.

RESULTS

At reaction level, the nurses' attendance was over 85% in two phases. The differences between nurse organizational innovation climate scores of tested nurses before and after training were statistically significant (t = -22.559, P < .001). At learning level, there were statistically significant differences between nurses' innovation self-efficacy scale scores of tested nurses before and after training (t = -16.832, P < .001). At behaviour level, the nursing innovation behaviour scale scores of tested nurses were significantly higher after training (t = -18.950, P < .001) than before the training. At result level, the clinical nurse innovation ability of tested nurses after the training were higher than before the training (t = -26.275, P < .001). The numbers of patent applications, granted patents, application for scientific research projects, sponsored scientific research projects, and papers published by team members after the training were larger than those before training (Z = -2.032, P = .042).

CONCLUSION

Kirkpatrick's model can evaluate the effectiveness of nursing innovation training for clinical nurses. The nursing innovation training is beneficial to improve nurses' innovation capacity, organizational innovation climate and innovation self-efficacy, and nursing innovation behaviour and promote the output of research and innovation projects.

IMPLICATIONS FOR NURSING MANAGEMENT

Managers can flexibly develop training modules with regional characteristics based on this programme to effectively improve the innovation ability of clinical nurses, thus meeting the urgent demand for innovative nursing talents and the rapid development of nursing disciplines.