Action Planning

Once you have assessed your organisation’s clinical learning environment, you need to develop a plan for addressing the issues or problem areas you have identified. Without an action plan, your health service will either take a very ad hoc (and potentially wasteful) approach to improving the quality of the clinical learning environment, or it may end up doing nothing at all. Having an action plan – particularly if it is signed off by senior management and there are accountabilities for its completion – will ensure that quality improvement with respect to clinical education does not languish as a low priority for the organisation.

You are now able to develop and track progress against your Action Plan within BPCLEtool. When you go to the action planning step, you will see a section for each of the six BPCLE elements. If you didn’t include some of the elements in your assessment, there will be a message to that effect against the relevant element(s).

For each element where you have completed some or all of the detailed assessment, you will see a card for each node that you nominated to include in the Action Plan. The cards will appear in the “To Do” column. If you nominated a priority for the node during the detailed assessment, you will see that displayed on the node card.

Click on the card to open it. In the “Card Status” section, you will be able to set the status of the card, the overall due date and the priority. In the “Tasks” section, you will see some generic tasks suggested by BPCLEtool. You don’t have to adopt those suggestions – they are just to get you started – and you can delete them if they are not relevant. You can also add your own tasks and you can assign tasks to individuals and set a due date.

Further down the card, you can upload documents and record notes or comments. You can also see indicators that are related to that node and, at the bottom of the card, BPCLEtool keeps a record of all actions taken in relation to the card, which will be useful for tracking your activity over time.

When you close the card, you will see the overall due date and priority you nominated. As the due date approaches, a warning will appear on the card.

The BPCLEtool Action Plan includes a drag-and-drop feature that allows you to easily move cards between the “To Do”, “In Progress” and “Complete” columns. You can also click on the up or down arrow on the right-hand side of each element title to hide or reveal the node cards for that element.

Watch the video tutorial for a demonstration of the action planning features of BPCLEtool.