At Billings Clinic in Billings Montana, healthcare associated infections plunged when all members of the organization - nurses, physicians, housekeepers, food servers, therapists, and executives - joined a collaborative effort that allowed each person to contribute to the cause of saving lives and preventing suffering. The initiative was based on Positive Deviance, the organizational and behavioral change strategy that enables communities to discover and amplify the things that are already working and devise new solutions tailored to their own specific work environments. In the process, they improved patient safety, developed healthy human networks that increased cooperation, enhanced harmonious workplace relationships and inspired continual commitment to a culture of high quality care.
About the Author: Dr. Arvind Singhal is the Samuel Shirley and Edna Holt Marston Endowed Professor of Communication and Director of the Social Justice Initiative in The University of Texas at El Paso's Department of Communication. He is also appointed, since 2009-2010, as the William J. Clinton Distinguished Fellow at the Clinton School of Public Service, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Arkansas. Singhal teaches and conducts research in the diffusion of innovations, the Positive Deviance approach, organizing for social change, the entertainment-education strategy, and liberating interactional structures. Singhal is co-author or editor of 12 previous books, including Health Communication in the 21st Century (2014); Inviting Everyone: Healing Healthcare through Positive Deviance (2010); and Protecting Children from Exploitation and Trafficking: Using the Positive Deviance Approach (2009). In addition, Singhal has authored some 175 peer-reviewed essays in journals of communication, public health, and social change and won over two dozen international and national awards. Prucia Buscell is a former newspaper reporter and freelance writer who is now communications director of Plexus Institute. She won several awards for writing public service, investigative and women's interest news stories in New Jersey. In her work at Plexus she has written extensively about complexity science and the use of Positive Deviance in healthcare and organizational change. She coauthored Inviting Everyone: Healing Healthcare through Positive Deviance. Curt Lindberg is Director of the Billings Clinic Partnership for Complex Systems and Healthcare Innovation and Principal in Partners in Complexity. Lindberg earned a doctorate in complexity and organizational change from University of Hertfordshire, United Kingdom, and studied under Ralph Stacey. Lindberg has played an important role in bringing complexity science concepts into healthcare and written numerous articles and coauthored several books, including Edgeware: Lessons From Complexity Science for Health Care Leaders and On the Edge: Nursing in the Age of Complexity. In 2004 he helped introduce Positive Deviance (PD) into healthcare and subsequently served as Principal Investigator on the first multi-hospital application in the U.S. He has served as an advisor on PD projects in the U.S., Canada and South America on such issues as blood stream infection prevention, palliative care, MRSA prevention, and pain management.