Danielle Haupt

? Just wondering..... I was thinking of including the patient safety learning hub details in our next Outreach/Hospital Out of Hours Team Newsletter which is aimed at all Trust staff. Is this OK whilst the 'hub' is only in its beta phase or would it be best to wait until it's official launch in October? Please let me know what you would prefer me to do? Thanks, Dani

Interesting article! Thanks for sharing. Had this experience first hand recently....after a long wait to see my GP.... I was finally referred to the specialty I needed and found there to be a 200 day wait until the next appointment! No wonder A+E departments are suffering so badly. ?

Hi Helen and Claire @Helen Hey Helen, thanks for your feedback..... pleased I managed to find the right place to post! And thanks @Claire Cox for uploading the article in the correct spot! Helen, I actually posted the above post on 'Call for Concern' to assist other teams, as I have had multiple teams request assistance with rolling out this service within their own Trust. As we have been privileged to have had this service in place in our Trust for many years.........I thought it would be helpful to share a different perspective on some of our experiences. You mentioned it wouldn't necessarily help me in the short-term..... this is no problem..... I think the 'hub' is an amazing idea and feel it has potential to be an invaluable resource for us all in the near future.... so this is good enough for me. I have already had some really kind, positive feedback from Kettering Outreach Team about my post above. I hope to see them on here soon, as I believe they will have some really useful feedback to share with us all. I have encouraged them to discuss their questions/experience etc on this thread. I plan to put together a post soon about our recent team Newsletter success which I started in Jan 2019. We have had some fantastic feedback regarding these from many staff within our Trust. I am also overwhelmed with the amount of positive feedback I have received from other Trusts about these. A number of teams have since approached me to assist with their own team Newsletters within their Trusts. For this reason, I thought it might be a useful thing to post on the 'hub'? As requested, I am more than happy for you to contact me directly to help shape your work over the next few months. I am working hard to promote the 'hub' within our Trust, so I look forward to seeing a few familiar names appear soon! (fingers crossed). Keep up the good work Patient Safety Learning Team! Thank You Speak soon. ?

Hi All This is my first post on the hub (I hope it's in the right place....please let me know if not!). I am Dani, a Critical Care Outreach Nurse at Southend Hospital, Essex. We have had our 'call for concern' service for many years now, but are in the process of re-launching it. I hope to share some recent experience with you to help anyone who is also working on their Call for Concern service currently. It's such an invaluable service to offer to our patients and visitors and one I personally feel very passionate about. Last year, I carried out an audit which proved my suspicions.... our potentially excellent service was there ready and waiting for calls, but was underused. The audit proved that very few staff even knew our service existed! (when I am back in the office....I can update you with some actual figures if anyone would like to know?). As staff were not informing patients/visitors of our helpline and supporting them to call us due to their own limited knowledge, calls were reliant on patients/visitors spotting the odd patient information leaflet here and there (although these were often not visible on the wards and, in my opinion, rather outdated anyhow). This led me to start my mission! So far I have designed/revised a new patient information leaflet and it's in the pipeline to be printed (frustratingly, this has now taken over a year to finalise due to various hurdles I have had to jump over). I have already prepped business cards, posters and stationary all in hope of ensuring patients, staff and visitors are aware of our service and understand how and when to call us. Once the leaflet is finalised, I will start working on the rest of the publications. Our Outreach team are informing patients and families during our routine clinical Outreach reviews and especially making a point of ensuring patients have our details when we 'discharge' them from our Outreach 'books' (ie. no longer regularly reviewing them). We are also supporting our 'neck-breathing' patients to contact us (I love seeing the relief on their face when they realise they can just text us if they feel they're in trouble, as most feel extra vulnerable being unable to shout for staff attention). Critical Care and HDU staff are also talking to their patients about our service to support them during their transition to ward level care and provide them with some reassurance (and safety net). Patients and visitors are encouraged to share our contact details with their friends and families for future admissions. We are also working hard to promote our service on Twitter. In January 2019, I also launched our quarterly Outreach Newsletter which is aimed at all hospital staff. This has been a huge success and am regularly receiving great feedback about these. I ensure Call for Concern is a regular topic featured in our Newsletter to get staff talking about it. (happy to share our Newsletters with anyone interested?). When completing the audit and seeking staff feedback, a common theme was mistaking "Call for Concern" with "Cause for Concern" which locally, we know as a phrase to highlight issues with any failing student nurses. The word 'Concern' in general, also appeared to create a barrier to calling us. Following on from this, we decided to name our "Call for Concern" service "We're Listening". The name is still negotiable, but appears to be working currently.... it originated from staff/patients saying "so.... if we feel we are deteriorating, we've told the ward nurses and doctors, and we still feel nobody is listening.... we call you?".... that summed it up pretty well for us, so the name was born. In the early days, I identified another barrier to success.....team reluctance to promote the service. This was due to belief that we would receive an abundance non-urgent PALS calls (believed not to be relevant to our focus of work), and we would not be able to manage the extra workload it would create, as we were already stretched. I was privileged to discuss various concerns with Mandy O'dell herself (via Twitter) and was also reassured by her insightful article. I would highly recommend reading this and speaking with Mandy if you can. I am happy to pass on a few tips that she kindly shared with me too, if you are unable to discuss these with her directly yourself or access the article. Now that our team have been reassured by this, they are also much more willing to promote the service and appreciate its value. We have identified deterioration in so many patients that potentially may have been missed/delayed.....it seems worth all the effort! Since taking over the Call for Concern service, I have been keeping a log of all our calls to help identify common themes that may arise...I am happy to share what I can (for confidentiality reasons) if anyone would find this useful? I have a few more ideas/plans in the pipeline so will try to update you with how I get on in due course. One of these being an email address that I have had created for public us. It's not yet launched (as waiting on the leaflet), but we hope it will be another means of contact (likely for less-urgent matters). The email is received by the Outreach team and our Hospital Out of Hours team so hopefully a quick response can be made. Anyway, I hope some of my experiences described above may be of use. For anymore information, please contact me and I will happily help if I can. I am still lucky to work with the Outreach nurse who originally set the service up at Southend (Angela).... so if you would like me to ask her any specifics, just let me know and I will ask on your behalf. Good luck, and look forward to networking with more of you on here soon. Take Care Dani Feel free to follow us on Twitter: @Dani_CCOT and @CCOT_Southend