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Showing results for tags 'Communication'.
Found 1,213 results
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Content ArticleBoth staff and patients want feedback from patients about the care to be heard and acted upon and the NHS has clear policies to encourage this. Doing this in practice is, however, complex and challenging. This report, by the National Institute for Health Research, features nine new research studies about using patient experience data in the NHS. These show what organisations are doing now and what could be done better. Evidence ranges from hospital wards to general practice to mental health settings. There are also insights into new ways of mining and analysing big data, using online feedback and approaches to involving patients in making sense of feedback and driving improvements.
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Content ArticleMaternal mortality rates in the US are rising, particularly among black women. Feeley and Torres, in this article published by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, describes three things health care leaders can do to understand the contributing causes of mortality, including racism, and factors to reduce inequities and improve safety in maternal health.
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Content ArticleThe need for effective teamwork and improved communication amongst caregivers is increasingly recognised in healthcare policy worldwide. As healthcare organisations navigate in highly complex contexts, they are largely dependent on thorough collaboration and sharing of information between staff at all levels. Promoting high‐quality teamwork based on effective and frequent communication is therefore essential for developing well‐functioning healthcare organisations
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Miles Sibley: Changing the culture of learning from deaths
Patient Safety Learning posted an article in Culture
In this BMJ Opinion article, Miles Sibley, Director for the Patient Experience Library, reflects on why there is still a failure to listen to patients and bereaved families when things go wrong. Instead we find that over and over again, when patients die avoidable deaths, their shocked and grieving relatives are locked out of investigations, refused access to information, and denied justice. -
Content ArticleIn the worst moment of your life, what would you need? In 2017, Jen Gilroy-Cheetham’s life changed forever. Just six months after having her second child, she was diagnosed with a rare neuroendocrine tumour and was advised that she would need to undergo open surgery to have half of her stomach removed. Complications led to one of the darkest and scariest times of Jen’s life, as she was put into a hospital ward feeling unwell, vulnerable and unsafe. Now recovered, Jen shares her experiences as a patient from a hospital bed - or audience member - watching all of the healthcare staff around her - actors on a stage - doing everything they could to make her feel safe. In reliving her journey to recovery, Jen highlights what’s needed within a healthcare setting to make patients feel safe. Jen feels that highlighting what’s worked well to help her to feel safe and what needs to change is valuable and may help others in the future.
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Content ArticleSchool mental healthcare often is provided by teams contracted from community mental health agencies. The team members that provide this care, however, do not typically receive training in how to work effectively in a team-based context. Team Strategies and Tools to Enhance Performance and Patient Safety (TeamSTEPPS) provides a promising, evidence-based strategy for improving communication and climate in school-based teams. The authors of this study adapted and piloted TeamSTEPPS for use with school mental health teams. TeamSTEPPS was feasible and acceptable to implement, and leadership emerged as an important facilitator. Barriers to implementation success included staff turnover, lack of resources, and challenges in the school mental health team relationship. Results suggest that TeamSTEPPS is promising for school mental health teams but additional modifications are likely needed.
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Content ArticleTeamworking is fundamental to the future of general practice. Practices are coming together at scale in primary care networks and new roles are being introduced, creating multidisciplinary and multi-agency teams. Making these teams function effectively is a complex task. This guide from The King's Fund brings together insights from their research, policy analysis and leadership practice. The need for collaboration and communication underpins much of the guide and it providex further reading and case studies to support each section. Some of the sections will be more relevant to you than others, but if you are a GP, practice manager or other professional working in primary care, or you are supporting practices, this guide will help you think how you will go about creating and sustaining effective teams within general practice.
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Content ArticleBoth staff and patients want feedback from patients about the care to be heard and acted upon and the NHS has clear policies to encourage this. However, doing this in practice is complex and challenging. This report from the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) features nine new research studies about using patient experience data in the NHS. These show what organisations are doing now and what could be done better. Evidence ranges from hospital wards to general practice to mental health settings. The report found that although a lot of resource and energy goes into collecting feedback data, less goes into analysing it in ways that can lead to change or into sharing the feedback with staff who see patients on a day-to-day basis. Patients’ intentions in giving feedback are sometimes misunderstood. Many want to give praise and support staff and to have two-way conversations about care, but the focus of healthcare providers can be on complaints and concerns, meaning they unwittingly disregard useful feedback. The report provides insights into new ways of mining and analyzing big data, using online feedback and approaches to involving patients in making sense of feedback and driving improvements.
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Content ArticleCommunication and care delivery is enhanced when teams work together well. TeamSTEPPS® is a US government set of teamwork tactics and tools designed to help health care professionals work together safely and effectively.
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Content ArticleSouth Australia Health's patient-centred involves engaging with the consumer and the consumer to make sure they are responsive to their needs, values and preferences. One way South Australia Health gathers feedback is to survey people who have spent time in a country or metropolitan public hospital. In 2017, 2228 people were interviewed and their responses were analysed. This report summarises the results of the survey.
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Content ArticleA dilemma is a situation in which a difficult choice has to be made between two or more alternatives, especially ones that are equally undesirable. Healthcare is full of dilemmas as a result of the huge number of stakeholders with conflicting goals, multifaceted interactions and constraints, and multiple perspectives, which change daily. Dilemmas are created when safety conflicts with productivity, cost efficiency, and flow. A focus on one patent’s safety may conflict with a focus on all patients’ safety. It is vital that the different stakeholders talk to expose dilemmas and reveal the hidden trade-offs or adjustments that are kept secret because people are fearful of the consequences. Articulating dilemmas helps us to find a way to bring people with different interests and incentives into a conversation that meets everyone’s needs.
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Content ArticleCommunication failures in healthcare teams are associated with medical errors and negative health outcomes. These findings have increased emphasis on training future health professionals to work effectively within teams. The Team Strategies and Tools to Enhance Performance and Patient Safety (TeamSTEPPS) communication training model, widely employed to train healthcare teams, has been less commonly used to train student interprofessional teams. This study, published in BMJ Quality and Safety, reports the effectiveness of a simulation-based interprofessional TeamSTEPPS training in impacting student attitudes, knowledge and skills around interprofessional communication.
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Content ArticleThis study, published in US journal Chest, looks at the case of a patient who experienced severe hypoglycemia due to an infusion of a higher-than-ordered insulin dose. The event could have been prevented if the insulin syringe pump was checked during the nursing shift handoff. Risk management exploration included direct observations of nursing shift handoffs, which highlighted common deficiencies in the process. This led to the development and implementation of a handoff protocol and the incorporation of handoff training into a simulation-based teamwork and communication workshop.
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Content ArticleRegardless of a patient's health literacy level, it is important that staff ensure that patients understand the information they have been given. The teach-back method is a way of checking understanding by asking patients to state in their own words what they need to know or do about their health. It is a way for clinicians to confirm they have explained things in a manner their patients understand. The related show-me method allows staff to confirm that patients are able to follow specific instructions (e.g., how to use an inhaler).
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Content ArticleThis American article looks at a patient safety communication strategy called 'teach-back', outlined by a Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) guide. During patient teach-back, providers explain patient medical conditions, treatment options, or self-care instructions to patients. They then ask patients to repeat the information back to them in their own words. The goal of teach-back is to ensure that you have explained medical information clearly so that patients and their families understand what you communicated to them,” the AHRQ guide explains. “This low-cost, low-technology intervention can be the gateway to better communication, better understanding, and ultimately shared decision-making.”
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Content ArticleHealth professionals often assume they are skilled at communicating with colleagues, patients and families. However, many patient safety incidents, complaints and negligence claims involve poor communication between healthcare staff or between staff and patients or their relatives, which suggests staff may overestimate how effectively they communicate. Teams that work well together and communicate effectively perform better and provide safer care. There is also growing evidence that team training for healthcare staff may save lives (Hughes et al, 2016). This article explores why teamwork and communication sometimes fail, potentially leading to errors and patients being harmed. It describes tools and techniques which, if embedded into practice, can improve team performance and patient safety.
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Content ArticleThe communication between nurses and patients' families impacts patient well-being as well as the quality and outcome of nursing care, this study aimed to demonstrate the facilitators and barriers which influence the role of communication among Iranian nurses and families member in ICU.
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WHO: Communication during patient handovers (May 2007)
PatientSafetyLearning Team posted an article in Processes
This is a patient safety solution document from the World Health Organization, focusing on communication during handover. It includes suggested actions, potential barriers and also ways to engage patients and families. -
Content ArticleThis report, published in BMJ Open Quality, sets out the findings of a National Health Service Improvement (NHSI) working group on care communication which included clinicians, patients, patient representatives, NHSI staff and academics from different disciplines. The group’s activities included running four national focus groups and discussion days, in addition to conducting national and international literature searches on healthcare communication and communication improvement.
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Content ArticleThis book explains the role of communication in mental health, emergency medicine, intensive care and a wide range of other health service and community care contexts. It emphasises the ways in which patients and clinicians communicate, and how clinicians communicate with one another. The case studies explain why and how communication is critical to good care and healing. Each chapter analyses real-life practice situations, encourages the learner to ask probing questions about these situations, and sets out the principal components and strategies of good communication.
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The Australian Open Disclosure Framework
PatientSafetyLearning Team posted an article in Processes
The Australian Open Disclosure Framework provides a nationally consistent basis for open disclosure in Australian healthcare. The framework is designed to enable health service organisations and clinicians to communicate openly with patients when healthcare does not go to plan. -
Content ArticleThe author of this article, published in Health Issues, argues that the experience and wisdom of consumers positively impacts on improvement in every dimension of health care quality. From a consumer perspective, those dimensions of quality can be described as care that is: accessible equitable safe effective efficient timely appropriate consumer-centred.
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Content ArticleThe objective of this systematic review, published by JBI database of systematic reviews and implementation reports, is to synthesise the eligible evidence of patients' experience of engaging and interacting with nurses, in the medical-surgical ward setting.
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Re-writing conversations
Claire Cox posted an article in By patients and public
The language we use in healthcare can have a huge impact on our patients and families. What we say and how we say it could have a negative or a positive impact. As clinicians we need to be mindful in how we say things and relay information. This short blog illustrates this. -
Content ArticleAvMA was originally established in 1982 as Action for the Victims of Medical Accidents following public reaction to the television play Minor Complications by AvMA’s founder Peter Ransley. The name was changed in 2003 to Action against Medical Accidents. Since its inception, AvMA has provided advice and support to over 100,000 people affected by medical accidents, and succeeded in bringing about massive changes to the way that the legal system deals with clinical negligence and in moving patient safety higher up the agenda in the UK.
