The application of the Resilience Assessment Grid in outpatient clinics: A validation study

The Resilience Assessment Grid (RAG) has gained increasing traction in healthcare discourse for its effectiveness in understanding and assessing the potential resilient performance of healthcare organisations. RAG is intended to be tailored for the specific organisation. However, developing a context specific RAG questionnaire can be time-consuming, limiting its widespread implementation. The current study aimed to investigate whether an existing Danish RAG questionnaire for outpatient clinics could be successfully content validated and applied in another outpatient clinic context. A modified Delphi method was used to content validate the Danish RAG questionnaire in the Australian outpatient clinic setting, using interviews and expert panel reviews. The 29-item English version of the RAG questionnaire was administered in 2023 to nine managers and five healthcare professionals responding on a five-point Likert scale, who work across 34 hospital outpatient clinics at Macquarie University (MQ) Health Clinics. The questionnaire was also employed during managerial and departmental meetings in a collaborative learning format. Descriptive statistics were used to analyse the data, which was then presented using radar charts to facilitate the interpretation of the resilient profiles of MQ Health Clinics. The translation and validation of the Danish RAG questionnaire was successful. The English language RAG questionnaire was perceived as useful by managers to assess their clinics’ resilient strengths and weaknesses and identify areas for improvement within their clinic. While the RAG methodology highlights the importance of context-specificity, this study's findings suggest that the content validated RAG questionnaire has the potential for application in other outpatient settings with minimal adaptation.