Clinic Self-Assessment – Six Building Blocks

The Six Building Blocks Self-Assessment is a good starting place for identifying and reflecting on where there are opportunities for improvement in your clinic’s chronic pain and opioid management work. The purpose of the self-assessment is to offer you a big-picture view of what is currently happening within your organization. It also is a practical way to dig into the Six Building Blocks concepts.

While one person can complete the assessment independently and get a good sense of where to target the improvement work, we highly recommend that you have others who will be affected by the improvement work complete the self-assessment. This might include clinicians, medical assistants, nurses, care coordinators, IT/data leads, social workers, behavioral health providers, the clinic manager, and/or pharmacists. Involving others builds support for the changes and can highlight where there are different viewpoints and why. Consider who the stakeholders are in this work and invite them to complete the self-assessment, either independently or as a group.

Perspectives from primary care clinics:

“Doing the self-assessment was useful in that it brought up opportunities. It was a reminder of what we could be focusing on going forward and where we’ve lapsed.”

“Filling out the self-assessment can feel good; ‘Hey, we are doing that! Oh, we’re doing that, too!'”

“[The self-assessment] helps refocus on what the Building Blocks are and what we’re hoping to achieve, anything we’re doing well with, and anywhere we’re falling off the plate.”

You can download the full self-assessment here or peruse the questions for each Building Block by selecting the tabs on the left.