Improving patient‐clinician meetings to develop SMART recovery goals in care plans using DIALOG+ on an adult inpatient psychiatric rehabilitation ward: a quality improvement project

There is a lack of evidence-based recommendations on how to structure routine patient‐clinician meetings to ensure optimal patient outcomes. As a result, the agreed care plan and actions from these meetings often produce goals which are not optimally recovery-focused and measurable. The team at Barefoot Lodge, an adult inpatient psychiatric rehabilitation ward, completed a quality improvement project to improve the quality of their care plan goals after a baseline audit revealed low scores for goals being recovery-focused and being broken into measurable milestones. The project aim was to improve the quality of these meetings and the quality of the care plans using a new patient outcome and care planning tool called DIALOG+. The team altered the structure of their routine patient‐clinician meetings, replaced their old care plan system with DIALOG+, and made these new plans central to their patient review process on the ward. The project successfully implemented the aims of the project by improving the quality of six out of the seven audit questions. DIALOG+ helped structure routine meetings on the ward, allowing patients to feel more involved in co-producing their recovery goals and being aware of what steps they can take to achieve them.