Barriers to champions

Barriers to change exist because health care occurs in a complex adaptive system:

• Individuals need to interact with small and large contexts.
• This context is an important factor in the change management and successful implementation.
• Change ideas rarely have universal support or agreement.
• Barriers may arise due to the dynamic situations created by the interventions of   environment and users.
• Successful adaption not only requires a change in practice, but also a change in attitude, beliefs, and processes. 
  

Change management strategies can support initiatives by contemplators and pre-comtemplators by:

• Raising awareness to the need to change behavior.
• Identifying importance of the need to change.
• Identifying barriers to change. 

                                                                                                                                          (Price et al., 2010)

Staff champions and barriers to change:

Understanding the individual barriers and change challenges that change champions can expect to face when attempting to make a change will support success.  For inexperienced change champions, the knowledge and awareness of barriers will allow for strategies to break down barriers.  Some barriers that champions may be faced with are:

• Underestimating the complexity of systemic change.
• Time constraints in regular workdays.
• Competing priorities.
• Engaging and maintaining participation of staff.
• Volume or complexity of data collection.
• Work schedules, assignments and other responsibilities.
• Inconsistent messaging, lack of clarity and unclear expectations of champions.
• Lack of leadership support.
• Lack of management support to the change.
                                                                                                          (Burnette et al., 2012)
  

Challenges faced by champions of change and considerations for champions to facilitate change

System wide and organizational barriers:

• Lack of research to support implementation of champion roles and expectations (Ploeg et al., 2010).
• Lack of first level leadership support to facilitate change by the champion (Bond & Fiedler, 1999).
• Personal attributes to becoming a champion are not clear and not everyone can be a champion.
• Physician champions require special attributes that are not taught in medical school, therefore becoming a champion for physicians is unnatural and requires passion and special dedication to the cause or change (Byrnes, 2010).
• Single identified champions versus a critical mass of numbers of champions.
• A single champion has a greater challenge in supporting a change versus a team based approach to change (Ploeg, 2010).
• Networking and social support when championing breaks down barriers (Carr & Clark, 2010).

learning activity 4

Have you been a champion?
Did you volunteer or were you assigned the role?
Did you receive education to prepare for the role?
Was it a positive or negative change experience?

Share your experience with your classmates and let's see if there is a common thread.