The month of May always brings blossoming flowers to the courtyard outside the IHI offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts — and this year is no different. Inside, our garden of content is blooming, too. This happens every month, of course. With so many great improvement stories out there and so much learning to share, we create dozens of pieces of content — blog posts, publications, WIHI episodes, Open School courses, videos, and more — that we hope will teach and inspire.

But let’s be honest: You’re busy. You don’t have time to read, watch, and listen to every piece of content IHI produces.

So to help, we’ve decided to assemble a roundup featuring the “top five picks” of the month. You may have seen some of these items (and we hope you’ll agree they’re worth a second look), while others will be new. Like many things we do here at IHI, this roundup will be a test. If you, our customers, find it helpful and useful, we’ll make it a regular feature. If not, we’ll keep working to find new ways to get useful content to you.

Here, in no particular order, are the five brightest blossoms from May:

1. “Civility Is Everyone’s Responsibility,” a blog post from IHI President and CEO Derek Feeley. This was one of our most popular blog posts of the month, garnering more than 2,000 views in the first week after it was published. One of Feeley’s most poignant lines: “If we see our colleagues and peers treating others — or being treated — without civility, it’s our duty to call that out. It’s our responsibility to raise that issue, and to comfort and support those who are on the receiving end.”
2. TA 102: Improving Health Equity, a free course from the IHI Open School. IHI published the course last year; this year, we decided to make it free for all customers (students and professionals) to underscore our commitment to improving health equity as one of our strategic priorities. More than 1,100 people completed the course in May. Were you one of them? If not, we promise it’ll be a worthwhile two hours.
3. “A Framework for Improving Health Equity,” a Healthcare Executive article from John Whittington, MD, and Mara Laderman, a senior research associate at IHI. This article presents an overview of a framework developed by IHI to help guide leaders in improving health equity by making it a system-level priority for their organizations.
4. “Joy in Work: An Antidote to Today’s Burnout in Health Care,” a WIHI broadcast. In the most popular WIHI this month, IHI’s Derek Feeley said the way to solve the problem of clinician burnout is 1) to flip it on its head: reframe it from reducing burnout to infusing joy and fulfillment back into our workforce, and then 2) to apply classic quality improvement methods to change the broken systems at the core. Three other panelists provided data and great stories from their own hospitals demonstrating that this two-part strategy works.
5. “A Simple Question to Put Patients in the Driver’s Seat,” a blog post from Beth Hennessey and Paula Suter, Executive Director and Clinical Director at the Sutter Center for Integrated Care in Fairfield, California. This popular post includes stories that illustrate how simply asking "What matters to you?" instead of just "What's the matter?" has the power to change the lives of both patients and clinicians.

Like the roundup? Do you prefer to get your improvement resources and news another way? We’d love to hear from you in the comment box below.