Achieving change readiness for health service innovations

Abstract

Continual innovation to address emerging population needs necessitates health service ongoing redesign and transformation worldwide. Recent examples include service transformations in response to Covid‐19, many of which were led and managed by nurses. Ensuring change readiness is central to delivering these transformative changes yet has been identified as a central challenge impacting nurse leaders and managers. Recent evidence indicates that affective commitment to change among healthcare staff may be an important contributor to gaining support for change implementation but understudied in healthcare. A cross‐sectional survey study was used to examine the association between affective commitment to change and change readiness among 30 healthcare staff across four projects in one state‐wide health system in Australia. Our findings indicate that affective commitment to change; healthcare worker's emotional and personal perception of the value of the proposed change is independently associated with individual and collective change readiness. Given that achieving change readiness is a central goal of change management strategies, this pilot work provides valuable insight to inform the change management practices of nurse leaders and managers.