Ice breakers can be an effective way of starting a training session or team-building event. As interactive and often fun sessions run before the main proceedings, they help people get to know each other and buy into the purpose of the event.

Answer the following questions quickly without giving them much thought. Do you expect a boss to wear an Armani suit or khaki trousers with jogging shoes? Should she travel to work on a mountain bike or in a limousine? Do you call him “Mr. Director,” or are you more likely to address him as “Sam”? How you respond to these questions depends on your individual personality. It also may reflect the country you come from.

Trying to do two things at once is usually a recipe for doing both badly, according to a long line of research. We’re slower and less accurate when we try to juggle two things. Experts came to believe that there wasn’t much that could be done about this, so most of the advice in HBR has been to avoid multitasking as much as possible. But if giving up multitasking isn’t an option, a new study  published in inPsychological Science offers some hope: your ability to multitask may depend on whether you were trained to do the two tasks separately or simultaneously.

NHS Improving Quality has produced two bite-sized guides supporting staff on their journey to becoming experts in the field. The first guide, entitled ‘The One Hour Improvement Expert: How to Become an Improvement Measure Expert in 60 Minutes’, is designed to offer an interactive introduction to the topic, featuring signposting to experts and key resources. The guide is divided up into a series of sections giving staff simple steps they can take to improve their knowledge and apply it to the workplace. Topics include indicators, sourcing and collecting data, driver diagrams, variation, and analysis. A second guide, entitled ‘The A to Z of Measurement’, aims to demystify much of the key terminology in the field by providing concise definitions. Alison Crawford, Measurement and Evaluation Manager at NHS Improving Quality, said: “There is some fantastic improvement work going on around the country in health care, but it’s vital that staff are supported to measure the work that they are doing.

As health care organizations focus more on keeping people healthy and delivering value, incorporating patient-reported measures (PRMs) as part of their overall performance improvement measurement system will be crucial. A new article in Healthcare Executive by Lucy Savitz, PhD, Director of Research and Education at Intermountain Healthcare and IHI faculty, and Kathy Luther, RN, Vice President at IHI, describes how PRMs help clinicians and patients assess whether a patient’s symptoms, lifestyle, daily activities, and functional status have improved as a result of the care provided.