Smart Goals In Healthcare

A vital step in Healthcare strategic planning is to come up with specific, measurable goals that can be communicated amongst everyone. For goals to be useful they must be SMART, which stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based. Margret Amatayakul defines SMART goals as “statements that help an organization establish expectations that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based” (Amatayakul, 2016). Specific, measurable, and time-based are pretty easy to understand and achievable and relevant are more abstract. A key element in setting a SMART goal is identifying “who,” “what,” “why,” “how,” and “when” will be considered in the process” (Book). Specific is considered “who” and you never want specific

The studies were done by biomedical testing, personal advice, lifestyle support, and change. Ultimately they wanted to ensure the “Health Care Professionals (HCPs) and patients’ experiences of delivering and receiving the National Health Service (NHS) health check in England (article).” CVD is one of the leading killers in the United Kingdom, NHS wanted to design a health check providers can use to prevent CVD by identifying risk factors and reduce its risk by preventing new ones from happening. Health check consists of them doing their initial appointment and then doing a normal biomedical test which consists of cholesterol, blood glucose, blood pressure, etc. During the initial appointment, healthcare providers show pots of fat, salt and sugar to the patients so they can have a visual effect of the recommending daily amount serving for all three things. During the initial or follow up visits (After reviewing blood test results), the provider sits with the patient and create SMART goals to change health behaviors. Then they need to come back after five years to repeat tests and make adjustments to their goals if needed. (Article) After surveying patients and healthcare providers, to ensure the health check was in fact working and the

Two hundred and fifty one second year medical students from the VU University Medical Centre in Amsterdam, Netherlands participated in this study and they were divided into three groups randomly, one was a control group, world health organization group, and SMART group. Each group got their own training session depending on which group you were a part of. The first day, the control group had attended training and just got the normal basic training with no instruction on setting treatment goals. Second day, the WHO group, received training materials obtained from the WHO Guide to Good Prescribing. The Third day, the SMART group got a one page paper with instructions on using SMART criteria to set treatment goals (Article). All the students were given four written case reports with patients with a diagnosis of asthma. They came up with the scoring templates by having 25 pulmonary physicians review the case and give their own treatment plan, then 22 of the physicians would go through the treatment plan and rank it one (Disagree) to five(Agree). Then 18 physicians would go through the ranking sheet and choose any plan with a greater score of 3.5 we included when judging the students. The results