Palliative care : an environment that promotes continuous improvement, learning and innovation

In increasingly complex, dynamic, and financially constrained environments such as hospitals, there is a need to develop innovative solutions to problems related particularly to the cost and quality of care, and to do this on an ongoing or continuous basis. Innovative teams need "hard, focused, purposeful work" requiring "diligence, persistence, and commitment" [1, p. 72]. These are the key, almost overpowering, characteristics of teams and team members in the palliative care environment. This chapter describes the capabilities needed to manage continuous innovation, radical innovations, and continuous incremental improvements in such an environment.