By Merryn Dowson, assistant psychologist and part of the team behind rehab goal-setting platform Goal Manager
A stitch in time saves nine. Rome wasn’t built in a day. The best things take time.
We are all too aware that some of the most important parts of our lives have been crafted, carved and developed over months and years. Consider your education, for example: you may well have been to primary school, secondary school and then sixth form college. Perhaps you went on to do an undergraduate degree.
You may even have taken another leap and completed a Master’s degree or a Doctorate. This took years. You learned, revised, sat exams, sat resits, applied for places, got results, got rejected, got accepted, and made it here.
One thing is certain: compared to all of this expertise, someone who completed a two-hour online course on the same topic does not come close. We know that putting time and effort into something gives us better results than if we tried a quick approach.
We do not always lead by this example though. Despite the knowledge that great results are only achieved through hard work and perseverance, sometimes we decide just not to bother. Often, a room in our home might look cluttered, worn down and unloved and it could be made to look incredible.
The walls could be painted, clutter cleared, carpet cleaned, furniture patched up, curtains updated, but it is so much effort. We see the effort it would take and keep living with it. It does the job. It’s fine.
We heard this a lot when we began to develop our software. Goal Manager was designed from within a clinical neuropsychology service with young people with acquired brain injury, and we recognised how goal setting was becoming an intimidating concept within our service and our colleagues across the field.
To combat this, we developed an online goal-setting platform which streamlines the key processes of goal setting into one system and allows members of multi- disciplinary teams (MDTs) to collaborate on goal data remotely.
Crucially, it was designed to fill a hole. The more daunting goal setting became, the more it was shied away from, and the guidelines for goal setting that had emerged from the literature were falling to the wayside.
While we designed our platform to save time on completing all of the gold-standard processes of goal setting compared to doing them manually, we found that people had often not been completing them at all. It was all too complicated.
As a result, we recognise that adopting a software solution like Goal Manager can come with its own problems to solve. It requires relearning a lot of
what we know about a concept like goal setting, understanding properly how these key processes work and how they can be applied clinically to benefit clients.
It is only then that you can start to think of ways to make it more efficient. To help with this, our users are offered bespoke demonstrations, guided MDTs through meetings to help with the clinical application of the data, and training on assessments and goal attainment.
This takes time. Our users are often throwing out their previous guide and writing a new one. When surveyed, however, every single one who responded said that it was worth it.
This brings us back to where we started: the best things take time; Rome was not built in a day; a stitch in time saves nine. By taking time to develop an understanding of goal setting and being able to apply it to a software solution, users experience all of the benefits of best-practice goal setting outlined in the literature both for their clients and for their teams.
Clients are motivated, rehabilitation is meaningful, important areas to address are highlighted, MDTs are focussed, clinical practice is evidenced – the list continues. None of this would have been possible without the initial investment of time.
While simple enough to read, this is no doubt overwhelming to apply to your service or practice and, with this in mind, there are some key points to remember. The most significant is that there is no better time than now.
The world is slowly opening its eyes, sitting up in bed and having a good stretch after the darkness of the Covid-19 lockdown. It is not yet certain if we are going back to snooze or if we are leaping out of bed afresh.
What we do know, however, is that we are heading into a brand new day. Even for those of us who continued in practice throughout the pandemic, services have been slightly paused in one way or another, whether that be refraining from home visits or having fewer people in the office.
We are all very aware that we are heading into the “new normal” rather than our old ways. Use this time to bring new and innovative ways of working into your practice. You might completely change your filing system, consider how you approach your waiting lists, or change how you approach MDT meetings.
Whatever you have been wanting to do for you and your service for so long, now is that time.
Perhaps you decide that you are going to welcome change but not all at once. That works too! For users of Goal Manager, we often suggest that starting with one or two clients might feel more manageable than a whole caseload.
This can help get to grips with the new concepts and ways of working without feeling like everything is completely disrupted. This applies elsewhere too. If you are wary of integrating a system into your whole service, start with one corner of it, evaluate, take what you have learned and then look to apply it more widely.
Finally, remember that all time taken to improve and grow impacts more than just what you set out to do. When people lose weight, they rarely conclude
by saying they just lost weight: they often enthuse about how they feel more energised or move easier or feel more positive or experience less anxiety.
This applies to any time you invest in developing your clinical practice or your service.
While time spent learning how to use Goal Manager and establishing it within a caseload is designed to improve goal setting, that investment also leads to improved assessment processes, more effective meetings, improved digital literacy, increased patient involvement and so much more.
The potential is enormous. To motivate you to start the process, look at what you want to achieve and how that might trigger other improvements.
While the world is still trying to drag its head off the pillow to open up the lockdown curtains, look to invest in addressing those needs you have always been aware of but never felt like you could justify the time.
Walk around your “house” and look into each room: is this the best it can be or could I give it a lick of paint?
Is now the time to bring meaningful solutions into my practice? Maybe grab a tester pot and try a new shade on the walls. Sign up for a free trial. Plan to grow and improve. Start building Rome.
To invest in improving your goal setting, visit www.goalmanager.co.uk to register for a live demonstration, sign up for a free trial or request a bespoke tour through the platform and its features.