Blooper Book

By: Duke Rohe  drohe@att.net

Overview: Have you ever watched TV bloopers? It is where what was planned goes awry. In service delivery, bloopers can cause grief to an otherwise good experience. Here’s a way to engage the staff in recognizing their harm and taking an active role in never letting them occur again. 

Purpose:

• Get the workforce to comprehend service ‘flops’ from the patient’s eyes
• Use mistakes as a platform to declare we will NEVER allow this again.
• Provide orientees how what they do or don’t do impact the patients

Participants: A service SWAT team or better yet, an entire workforce

Materials: Blooper Book Handout

Time: 30 minutes

Procedure:

Column 1

• Manager or team representative writes up the departmental blooper from the patient’s perspective.  Elaborate on how the patient might have felt during the service drop.

Column 2 All staff or SWAT team

• Read the case study as presented from patients viewpoint
• List all the possible service ‘flops’ where service was dropped
• Write what you think would prevent this from ever happening again or minimize/recover from its effects.

Column 3  Manager or SWAT team

• Collect all the staff’s input
• Summarize those pointers that would have made a difference.
• Transform these pointers into a procedure or process changes.
• Where staff compliance is required, present the new change and gain staff agreement to follow new procedures and endeavor never allow this again.

Debrief: Catalog Blooper, What Went Wrong and Solution in the Blooper Book.  It is the staff’s banner to say, we will never allow this again.