Editor’s Notebook: A Strange Alchemy
May / June 2006
Editor’s Notebook
A Strange Alchemy
Prague was the European center of alchemy in the Middle Ages and, in April, was the host city for a conference that featured experiments in the application of alchemy to healthcare improvement. Or so it seems in retrospect.
The 11th European Forum on Quality Improvement in Healthcare was co-sponsored by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) and the BMJ Publishing Group. It brought together approximately 1,000 people from 49 countries for 3 days of educational sessions: stimulating plenaries, interactive small-group sessions, extensive poster presentations, and lively conversation at meals and receptions.
The Forum was exceptionally inspiring, with a palpable rise in energy among attendees as the conference progressed (how often does that happen?) and an unusual degree of meaningful interaction among attendees. There was a surprisingly creative vibe to this conference. Jenny Kowalczuk, associate editor of www.saferhealthcare.org.uk, made the analogy to alchemy in her blog about the conference on the BMJ Web site (www.bmjjournals.com):
But the Forum is not an easy place to hang out if you find it difficult to think laterally… It is a meeting point for many people with many agendas at many different levels of influence. But a strange alchemy did occur last week—amongst all the diversity of knowledge, experience and systems, a quiet realization grew—of order from chaos, consensus from cacophony.
That sense of order and consensus grew as we heard local success stories from healthcare organizations spread across the globe, which affirmed a shared purpose. The overall effect was to promote optimism for meaningful change, with recognition of the difficulties ahead. In his opening plenary, Don Berwick, president and CEO of IHI, set the agenda, which he calls “spread.” How can all interested parties participate in “scaling up” improvement efforts—applying lessons learned in limited settings throughout larger organizations. There is no one answer—in his plenary, Berwick offered five different approaches to scaling up—and the contributions of many will be required for success. The kind of “strange alchemy” that happened at the European Forum, while difficult to anticipate or plan for, will help.