Get started

Improvement approach

Delivering better asthma care begins with a commitment to continuous improvement. 

While this toolkit presents a range of improvement strategies, we recommend they are tested and adapted to suit your local context.

Quality improvement toolkit

Our Quality Improvement Toolkit includes fact sheets, practical tools, templates and resources to help Victorian health services improve the quality of care in Victoria. 

These tools support services  to:

• gain a better understanding of problems and current state
• identify solutions
• develop and measure effective improvement strategies and activities
• Use Plan, Do, Study, Act (PDSA) cycles to test and implement improvements at your service.

The toolkit provides the methodology and structure to support services to implement the MAGIC change package effectively.

Use the toolkit to:

• set clear aims and measures 
• identify and prioritise change ideas for your local setting
• test and adapt ‘MAGIC’ strategies using  PDSA cycles  to suit your local healthcare setting.

A suite of online modules is also available to support the development of quality improvement capability across health services: https://www.safercare.vic.gov.au/best-practice-improvement/online-training/quality-improvement-training-modules

Build your improvement team

To support your childhood asthma care improvement initiative, establish a diverse, motivated team to lead, implement and embed improvement..

Who to include

Healthcare professionals

Start by involving staff who work directly with patients and the care processes you are wanting to improve. Their frontline experience helps to identify practical challenges and opportunities for improvement. This may include:

• frontline clinical staff such as nurses, doctors, and allied health professionals involved in asthma care
• pharmacy staff who play a key role in medication access and discharge  planning
• administrative staff who support coordination and process changes.

Senior leaders

Involve senior leaders who can provide authority, remove barriers, and maintain momentum. 

Some changes are simply not possible without the influence and authority of decision makers. Their support ensures that improvement efforts are prioritised and embedded into everyday work.

Lived experience experts

We strongly recommend including lived experience experts in your change team. This includes individuals and families with firsthand experience of childhood asthma.

Understand and address common challenges

Understanding common challenges that may emerge during improvement work and planning for them early, by building strategies to manage them from the start will help set your team up for success. 

Staff turnover impacts improvement efforts

Staff turnover can disrupt the momentum of improvement initiatives and reduce engagement and consistency. 

To mitigate this risk, we recommend that you:

• plan for periods of transition (e.g. medical rotations; onboarding of new graduate staff)
• avoid relying on individual team members to maintain progress, engagement and consistency.
• embed changes and strategies into systems and processes, rather than making them dependent on specific people or roles .

Higher-level changes often face greater resistance

The more ambitious the change, the more likely you are to encounter resistance or difficulty during implementation.

While these system-level changes can be time-consuming and complex, they are often the most impactful and sustainable. 

To address this, we recommend that you: 

• identify and understand the potential challenges as early as possible
• plan for these challenges and allocate resources where they are most needed.

Resistance is part of the change journey

Resistance to change is a normal and expected part of any improvement process.

To address this, we recommend that you: 

• involve those who do the work in the improvement process
• start small, with safe‑to‑fail tests of change and gradually increase scale and complexity, so teams can learn quickly, build confidence, and reduce resistance and implementation barriers before embedding changes into routine practice. 
• include senior leaders across all aspects of change you are intending to make encourage senior leaders to:
  • remove barriers and help navigate resistance
  • reinforce the importance of the initiative
  • maintain momentum during challenging phases.