Who said that being deviant is a bad thing?
Dr. Alex Marra, a former trainee of ours, recently published a paper on positive deviance and hand hygiene.
 |
| Photo: CDC |
Positive deviance is a social and behavioral change process based on the premise that in most organizations and communities there are people or groups of people who solve problems better than colleagues with the exact same resources.
With respect to hand hygiene, positive deviants are healthcare workers who want to change and develop new ideas for improving hand hygiene and who stimulate other healthcare workers to wash their hands. In essence, the positive deviants of a hospital are empowered to promote hand hygiene in creative, collaborative and non-threatening ways. They are hand hygiene ‘champions’.
In this paper, the positive deviance approach was responsible for a sustained improvement in hand hygiene and was associated with a decrease in the incidence of device-associated hospital acquired infections.
I am not sure if positive deviance is sustainable, especially if it does not lead to policy and expectation change in a hospital. What happens if the driving force, the deviant, changes employment, loses interests or simply quits? Will practice revert back to the norm? Must a successor to the deviant be identified?
At the very least, the concept of positive deviance appears beneficial in the short term.
So, go ahead, be (positively) deviant.
