Homerton University Hospital Action Card App: Winner of the Patient Safety Learning Award 2019

Summary

Our experience of attending the Patient Safety Learning Annual Conference and entering our patient safety initiative into the awards.

Content

We have a new app within Homerton which is featured on the hub. The Homerton University Hospital (HUH) Action Card App is an initiative that aims to bridge the gap between information/processes with clinical members of staff without the need to log into a computer, access the intranet, and finding the long black and white document which is never ending. The Action Card App has easy to read, 1-page coloured documents relating to local and national/local incident trends and Never Events.

We entered the Patient Safety Learning Awards on the back of seeing the hub and finding content on there that was incredibly useful on a day to day basis.

We genuinely weren't expecting to hear anything back from the Patient Safety Learning team as we are a small trust that not a lot of people know about, and we thought the standard of patient safety initiatives would be high, with many trusts miles ahead of us.

I have to say, the team at Patient Safety Learning were nothing but lovely, from the moment the conversation started about the prospect of entering the awards. They all took the time for correspondence and they treated you as a person, as oppose to an entry.

When we got the information that we had won the overall prize, we were gobsmacked and elated. The app team were overjoyed with the sense that our hard work had paid off and someone had taken the time to appreciate the work we have been doing at Homerton.

We were asked to prepare a presentation prior to the awards, which showcased our work and to share with the attendees of the conference. 

The day arrived, with so much great work, inspiring talks and a general atmosphere of wanting to do more to keep our patients safe. I would like to thank everyone who heard our presentation (some may say performance) and thank everyone in the Patient Safety Learning team for their help with this process.

About the Author

I am a Senior Charge Nurse at Homerton University Hospital in London. 

I'd be happy to discuss the HUH Action Card App further with anyone interested in setting up something similar themselves. Email me: Lukebrown1@nhs.net