Test

What is a PDSA cycle?

PDSA cycles involves rapid cycles of planning, testing, studying the results and making changes.

Having identified your aim and established some measures that will help you to decide whether your change has resulted in an improvement, you then identify some ideas for changes. You can use PDSA cycles to test an idea, by trialling a change on a small scale and assessing its impact

Start small and through repeated cycles you can build up to achieving a large change.

Why PDSA?

• Small tests are easy
• Small is easy to undo if it doesn’t work
• People are happier to try small changes
• There is less risk
• You can test under different conditions
• Change is built and adopted gradually with less long term resistance

The PDSA template gives you some further ideas about the sorts of things to think about and do during each of the phases of a PDSA cycle.