BRAN Analysis
What is it?
BRAN is a framework often used by professionals to quickly make decisions with patients. Within quality improvement, it can be extended to consider the outcomes of a choice or change. It poses these questions:
What are the Benefits?
What are the Risks?
What are the Alternatives?
What if we do Nothing?
There are additional elements sometimes added making acronyms BRAIN(S) and BRAND(S) including :
(I) What is your Intuition telling you?
(D) What is the Decision?
(S) What does a Second opinion tell you?
It is often used in situations requiring a fast decision. It is a tool that patients are also encouraged to use with their care providers to better understand the potential outcomes of proposed treatments.
Why use it?
A BRAN analysis can be a quick, structured way to consider the possible outcomes of a choice or change. It helps to anticipate what could happen and quickly assess the opportunities, threats and challenges of a decision.
How to use it?
Within quality improvement work, BRAN can be used when considering a change idea and when planning changes. Working with team members where possible, work through the questions in relation to your change idea. It is important to work as a team as the benefits, risks, alternatives and impact of doing nothing are likely to be different for different staff groups.
e.g. Change idea: When a prescriber declines a prescription request, an email is sent to reception team member, Chris, to make contact with the patient.
Benefits:
Standardised process should make it easier to track when requests are declined
Practice is proactive, likely to decrease occasions when patients get frustrated that request has been declined
Risks:
Process may fail if Chris on annual leave
Chris may feel overwhelmed with amount of work, contributing to burn out
Alternatives:
Train more than one team member in the process
Have a shared way of communicating between prescribers, administrative staff and patients
Nothing:
Continue with current rate of declined prescriptions
Continue with current rate of staff and patient frustration