Stanford University currently requires that all Chronic Disease Self-Management Education (CDSME) Workshops have a minimum of 10 participants at the first session in order to comply with the fidelity requirements of this evidence based program. In response to considerable national discussion about the difficulty of finding 10 people in certain areas, Kate Lorig, Dr.P.H., Stanford Professor of Medicine, offered the opportunity for local programs to experiment with smaller workshops by submitting a proposal for a Rapid Change Cycle experiment.
Joyce Nussbaum, VPAS CDSME Coordinator, worked with April Holmes, Coordinator of Prevention Programs with the Department for Aging and Rehabilitative Services, to submit a Rapid Change Cycle Proposal to Kate Lorig. In order to increase the significance of the proposal, two other CDSME Coordinators were invited to participate. The proposal was accepted August 15 and the time frame for the experiment will be from September – December 2013.
The basis for the proposal is that CDSME Workshops offered in frontier and rural settings are often cancelled due to not having the required 10 participants to begin a workshop. Sometimes conducting a “session zero” informational meeting results in having a large enough group to proceed the following week but often the additional members are not fully interested and do not complete the workshop resulting in a lower completer rate and leaving the core group of original participants. When 10 participants are not available, the smaller group is denied access to the program and it is difficult to gain a commitment from them to attend a workshop in the future. Members of groups that have ended with 4 or 5 completers express a high level of satisfaction with the workshop experience and participants may be more likely to complete based on an increased sense of importance to the group process.
Joyce will send the results of the Rapid Change Cycle experiment to Kate Lorig and they be used to help determine if Stanford will allow smaller workshops in frontier and rural settings in the future.
More online at http://valleycdsme.com.
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