Clinical agility–an essential foundation for high quality healthcare. An experience report of the lessons learnt from designing a new cancer centre

Abstract

Agility is essential for healthcare given its dynamic and constantly changing nature. Healthcare organisations that lack agility face deteriorating care quality, impacting negatively on patient outcomes and staff. Simultaneously improving and delivering clinical care is challenging given the intense and growing operational pressures, finite resources and workforce limitations. Clinical staff are central to healthcare innovation and the rate of adaptation. High levels of staff overload, exhaustion and burnout create additional barriers but rarely feature in management models of change. This experience report describes the development of a new cancer centre, designed to enhance organisational agility–recognising the need for, and the benefits of, agility that is clinically driven. Such ‘clinical agility’ has an essential logic to optimise patient care, improve organisational performance and enhance staff wellbeing. We describe underlying principles and theory, creating a socio-technical perspective that creates the right conditions for clinical agility. We present a conceptual framework recognising four themes (physical working environment, processes and working practices, partnerships and people) and potential, under-recognised interactions between agility and clinical staff burnout and wellbeing. This study provides recommendations which enhance clinical agility, improve care delivery without compromising the most innovative resource of any organisation–its people.