Organisational Assessment

Whether you're an organisation or an organisational unit, knowing what you do is important, but knowing how you do it – and how well you do it – is the key to successfully and sustainably achieving your objectives.

Understandably, many organisations have become outcomes focussed, with an emphasis on achieving deliverables rather than on establishing and maintaining best practice. Periodic assessment of practice, drawing on the real-world experience of staff at the coalface, is an invaluable tool that can inform quality improvement activities and provide an evidence base for strategic planning.

We use an innovative assessment approach, MEER (Map-Enabled Experiential Review), to facilitate organisational review at any level and for any type of activity. Our consultants work with the client to develop bespoke program or process logic maps that form the basis for the assessment tool. Using the online application MEERQAT, the logic maps are converted into interactive tools that enable structured conversations amongst team members and other stakeholders and provide a repository of assessment-related information.

The system has been successfully used to create BPCLEtool, which assists organisations that provide clinical placements for health professional learners to assess themselves against the Best Practice Clinical Learning Environments (BPCLE) Framework.

The MEER approach has also been used in a successful research trial to address quality improvement in a clinical context. The MEER approach was well received by staff who reported increased awareness and understanding of the National Safety and Quality Health Service (NSQHS) standards and related hospital policies and protocols, as well as increased interest in quality issues and quality improvement. The study also revealed substantial improvement in quality and safety in the participating units, with a 34% statistically significant reduction in the recorded incident rates of the participating units relative to the rest of the hospital for a set of independently recorded incidents relating to patient identification. The study was peer reviewed and published in the BMJ Open Quality journal.

You can find out more about MEER and MEERQAT here.