Six thinking hats as a creative approach in managing meetings in hospitals

Abstract

Background: Meeting is a purposeful gathering of people, a goal oriented work session, a productive use of communal time and a cooperative group effort. Six thinking hats approach aims to encourage parallel thinking, full-spectrum thinking and to separate ego from performance.

Aim: The present study aims to explore the effect of using six thinking hats in managing meetings effectively.

Methods: It is a quasi-experimental study. The study was conducted in Dar el-Shefaa hospital in Cairo, Misr University for Science and Technology teaching hospital and Cleopatra hospital. Subjects were composed of three groups. The first group was comprised quality management committee in the selected hospitals; the second group was infection Control committee and the third one was hospital administration members. Three types of Questionnaire formats were used (study sample’s knowledge about criteria for effective meetings and six thinking hats and study sample’s evaluation of meetings management) plus opinionnare format to elicit the study sample’s opinion about application of six thinking hats in meetings post training.

Findings: The majority of the studied samples before awareness sessions demonstrated lack of knowledge about criteria of effective meeting and six thinking hats. As evident, most of them agreed upon items regarding using of six thinking hats in meetings post training. Finally, the majority of the studied hospitals had low score for meeting management before using of the six thinking and high score after using of them.

Conclusion: This study clearly showed lack of knowledge about criteria for effective meeting and six thinking hats in the majority of the study sample before the awareness sessions. Scores of the majority of study sample’s evaluation of meeting management were low before using of six thinking hats. Finally, post training, most of them agreed that using of six thinking hats increases the effectiveness of meetings.