Who are stakeholders and why are they important?
I wanted to share a little bit about the role of stakeholders, what that means, and how you can engage them in your project.
Who are stakeholders in the healthcare world?
Stakeholders are people that have a “stake in the game” so they would benefit or they are affected by the decision that you are making for the project you are trying to implement.
Stakeholders in the healthcare world are often administration, insurance companies, the clients we serve, their families, really anybody that benefits for the success of our project. They can also be an occupational therapist or other healthcare professionals.
Why are they important?
Stakeholders are important because they are the ones that are directly or indirectly impacted by the project. It’s important to consider their perspectives because not asking them can result in a project becoming stuck, lacking a budget, or not being implemented.
They really have an important voice and perspective that we should consider before moving forward, even if it's project we're really passionate about it. If you don't think about this ahead of time, it can lead to a lot of frustration down the road.
So who are your stakeholders?
How do you know who your stakeholders are?
For my business at OT Graphically, my stakeholders are researchers because they want to share their research with the world. In addition, occupational therapists want to use the information I provide with their clients. Also, clients because they often receive the infographics to be able to learn more about their care. Lastly, I would say the industry of healthcare including insurance companies. If clients know more about the care, it's going to improve the quality of care by professionals using more effective interventions by choosing to use the most updated care. So it can be a lot of people as you can see.
Think about who is impacted or could benefit from your project both inside and outside an organization.
How do we engage stakeholders and communicate with them?
The most important part of this is how do you find them and how do you engage them and when ?
So to find them you think where do they hang out?
Are they on social media? Are they in community centers? Are they at universities?
Then spend time going to those places and asking questions early on:
What do you think about this idea? Is this feasible? Is this something that you would be interested?
If the answer is no then you're already going to have a hard time getting that implemented even if you go through the program development or research project publication process.
Ways to get feedback from stakeholders
Some tips that I found helpful is using social media for your specific stakeholder. For example, Facebook groups for parents of autistic children if you are trying to implement caregiver support for that population or Instagram for occupational therapist that are new graduates if you wanting to get their perspectives. It can take some time to learn where your audience hangs out, but once you figure it out, you can also go back to it for additional feedback.
Once you find them, start getting their feedback about your project. Write down everything they say word-for-word or ask if you can record it. That way you can go back and relearn and re-remember, “Oh maybe this is why we're getting stuck at this point, they said that this was our problem for them, so we should really address that before we move forward with this project.”
Also, listening to others gives them a sense of empowerment to be able to be part of the project. At the end, they will be more excited to use the information because they were engaged in the development of it.
There are lot of cool tools to be able to reach out and engage stakeholders. For example, I create infographics for this point exactly. Being able to share the information with people that are actually receiving the care or doing the work to be able to get more buy-in from them asking, “Is this intervention helpful for you?”
Thinking about stakeholders is a really important thing to consider and it is a big time saver. Everybody wins when we think about who they are and how we can engage them throughout the process. This is how we can efficiently make the quality of our healthcare projects and programs even better.