Change–Are You Ready For It? #TPSER8

Day one of the third and final week at the Marseille Patient Safety Educational Roundtable and Student Summer Camp was not even officially underway when I had a conversation with Wendy Madigowsky MD, a medical educator and longstanding Roundtable faculty member from Denver, CO, about healthcare leaders having to first recognize the need for change in the way healthcare is delivered, in order to start implementing some of the ideas we are discussing here in the mountains. To that point, Dr. James Prochaska, who developed the Transtheoretical Model of Behavior Change and has authored over 300 papers on behavior change for health promotion and disease prevention, defined 5 stages of behavior change which include:

1. Precontemplation
2. Contemplation
3. Preparation
4. Action
5. Maintenance

Those unaware of the need for change are considered Precontemplators in Prochaska’s model, and are defined as:

Participants at this stage do not intend to start the healthy behavior… Continue reading →