Development of a business tool to evaluate the Northern Health Connections program

Organization and program self-assessments are important tools for enabling companies to learn and improve. Much like an annual health physical, they help managers better understand both what is working well and what areas require attention. Self-assessments also are effective for communicating priorities to various stakeholders and for monitoring progress over time, and their greatest value is their ability to enable organizations to improve their performance and produce positive results. Self-assessment tools are well evaluated in the literature, and Northern Health -- as an organization striving for excellence -- can make good use of them to meet the needs of it Northern Health Connections patient transportation program. Ideally, tools would already exist that can be easily modified to suit the program's needs however, because Northern Health Connections is a unique, multi-faceted program, it needs a new tool developed using existing self-assessment frameworks. This project proposes a tool consisting of a Route Evaluation Flow Chart (REFC) and accompanying questionnaire. The tool will assist managers at Northern Health Connections in the essential task of allocating transportation resources for moving patients to and from northern British Columbia's medical facilities. In this paper, I will present an overview of the relevant literature and then discuss the tool's conceptualization, design, and development. Finally, I will recommend that Northern Health Connections integrate the REFC tool into their daily operations.