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Showing results for tags 'Collaboration'.
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Content ArticleHealthcare settings have been using collaboratives to improve quality in healthcare, enhance patient safety and drive organisational change since the mid-1990s, when they became popular via the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s (IHI) Breakthrough Series model. QI Collaboratives are groups of people from different units or organisations who work together in a structured way and share learning and experience in order to create more efficient services. Collaboratives are generally set up to enhance patient safety, quality and efficiency of care. This Life QI article gives tips on how to run an Improvement Collaborative. Life QI is the global web platform where tools, people and data come together to make improvement happen.
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Content ArticleIn this article, Life QI looks in more depth at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s (IHI) Breakthrough Series Collaborative model, which was first launched in the mid-1990s and has been supporting improvements in healthcare quality ever since. Learning within a collaborative is thought to be one of the most successful methods that leads to quality improvement and system wide change - and the Breakthrough Series Collaborative model is one of these models. Described by the IHI as a ‘Collaborative Model for Achieving Breakthrough Improvement,’ the Breakthrough Series has been designed to help organisations by creating a structure in which interested parties can easily learn from each other and from recognised experts, within specific topic areas where they want to make improvements. The model supports the thinking that: “sound science exists on the basis of which the costs and outcomes of current health care practices can be greatly improved, but much of this science lies fallow and unused in daily work. There is a gap between what we know and what we do.” It is this very gap that the Breakthrough Series Collaborative aims to close by creating short-term ‘learning systems’ and teams built from people from different healthcare settings. This article summaries the Breakthrough Series Collaborative and gives tips and tools on how to create a Breakthrough Series Collaborative for your organisation. Life QI is the global web platform where tools, people and data come together to make improvement happen.
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Content ArticleThe NHS has been fighting for our lives for the last few weeks and months. Throwing all its resources at the COVID-19 pandemic. The millions of health and care workers involved have been magnificent and we must resource them better for the future. And it’s been up to us, the general public, how far and how fast the virus spreads. There will still be a vital role for us when this pandemic is over because the NHS can’t by itself deal with many of today’s major health problems such as loneliness, stress, obesity, poverty and addictions. It can only react, doing the repairs but not dealing with the underlying causes. There are people all over the country who are tackling these causes in their homes, workplaces and communities. People like the Berkshire teachers working with children excluded from school, the unemployed men in Salford improving their community; and the bankers tackling mental health in the City. They are not just preventing disease but creating health. And they take pressure off the NHS, so it is always there when we need it. Health is made at home challenges us to set aside our normal assumptions and take off our NHS spectacles to see the world differently and take control of our health. And it calls for a new partnership between the NHS, government and the general public to build a healthy and health creating society.
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Content ArticleThe quality and safety of patient care relies on good communication, teamwork and respect between staff. However, in many areas of the NHS hierarchical attitudes lead to a dictatorial approach in which senior nurses make decisions affecting their colleagues without any discussion or consideration of the impact and practicality of these decisions. This can lead to dysfunctional organisational cultures in which staff either tolerate and emulate disrespect or leave the profession. Ellen Wightman, a staff nurse at University Hospitals Bristol NHS Foundation Trust, reflects on the importance of nurses being supported in developing leadership skills – and having the motivation to create collaborative and positive cultures.
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Content ArticleEuropean drug regulations aim for a patient-centered approach, including involving patients in the pharmacovigilance (PV) systems. However many patient organisations have little experience on how they can participate in PV activities. The aim of this study published in Drug Safety, was to understand patient organisations’ perceptions of PV, the barriers they face when implementing PV activities, and their interaction with other stakeholders and suggest methods for the stimulation of patient organisations as promoters of PV.
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Content ArticleOne year ago, on 2 October 2019, we officially launched the hub at our annual conference. To celebrate this special occasion, we want to update you on how the hub has grown and the impact it’s having, both on the people using it directly and on patient safety more broadly. To date, the hub has over 1,000 members from 450 organisations and from over 40 countries. It’s home to over 3,000 pieces of content, has had 45,000 unique visitors and has been accessed 70,000 times. Although we are delighted with these numbers and continued growth of the hub, we are most proud of the relationships the hub is facilitating and the good work that is happening as a result. We launched the hub so that all members of the public – from patients to clinicians – could share their insight and experiences of patient safety. By working together with users of the hub, we aim to highlight patient safety concerns and take action so that real change can happen as we journey towards the patient-safe future. Wonderfully, we are beginning to achieve these aims. Here are some of the ways the hub has been making an impact.
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Content ArticleOne year ago, on 2 October 2019, we officially launched the hub at our annual conference. To date, the hub has over 1,000 members from 450 organisations and from over 30 countries. It’s home to 3,000 pieces of content, has had 45,000 unique visitors and has been accessed 70,000 times. Although we are delighted with these numbers and continued growth of the hub, we are most proud of the relationships the hub is facilitating and the good work that is happening as a result. We launched the hub so that all members of the public – from patients to clinicians – could share their insight and experiences of patient safety. By working together with users of the hub, we aim to highlight patient safety concerns and take action so that real change can happen as we journey towards the patient-safe future. Wonderfully, we are beginning to achieve these aims.
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Content ArticleAlthough airway safety is known to be one of the key components in safe care, thousands of patients lose their lives each year to poor airway management and unplanned extubations. In this Patient Safety Movement webinar, the team discusses starting an unplanned extubation project without buy-in from others, multi-institutional collaboration, pushback from leaders, colleagues, or other organisations, the future of interventions, clinicians who have experience with unplanned extubations as key advocates, and cross-checking pediatric and adult safety efforts. The panel ends with Drew Hughes’ story and the team emphasises taking a moment to ground yourself in your practice and the importance of speaking up when you think the patient is at risk.
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Content ArticleThis study from the THIS Institute, published in BMJ Quality and Safety, seeks to characterise features of safe care in maternity units. Hospital-based maternity units in the study displayed features that reinforce each other to optimise safety. The paper describes these features in a plain language framework, the For Us – For Unit Safety framework. Preventable harm in maternity care has devastating consequences for families, and the associated negligence claims create huge costs for the NHS. Reducing harm in maternity care is a major priority to protect families and NHS sustainability. Much work to date has focused on identifying what goes wrong in maternity care. This study takes a fresh, positive perspective and shares learning about what good looks like for safety in maternity units. The result is the For Us framework, which identifies the behaviours and practices that appear to be features of safe care in hospital-based maternity units. The framework doesn’t tell staff working in maternity units what to do. Instead it aims to aid reflection and collective learning and to target improvement efforts. It is an evidence-based framework that aims to support staff working in maternity units to reflect on what good looks like in a safe maternity unit, to identify and agree on priorities for improvement, celebrate achievements, or to make a case for increasing investment to achieve safety.
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Content ArticleThe Safe Airway Society is the interprofessional airway society for Australia and New Zealand. Its members represent a wide range of health professions including Anaesthetists, Intensivists, Anaesthetic technicians, Emergency Physicians, Nurses, Rural Doctors, Surgeons and Paramedics. Through innovative collaboration, the Safe Airway Society aims to create resources, including consensus guidelines, promote education and training with an emphasis on human factors and team performance, and improve systems through research and standardisation of practice. The Safe Airway Society aims to build an environment where safe and effective airway management prevails across all professions and for all patients. This video explains more.
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Content ArticleIn this report, the Care Quality Commission (CQC) explain the information they have gathered on the pressures that services and local systems have faced during COVID-19 and the efforts that have been made to tackle them. These insight reports are designed to help everyone involved in health and social care to work together to learn from the first stages of the COVID-19 pandemic by: sharing and reflecting on what has gone well understanding and learning from the experience of what hasn't helping health and care systems prepare better in the future.
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Content ArticleThe African Partnerships for Patient Safety (APPS) is a WHO Patient Safety Programme concerned with building sustainable hospital to hospital patient safety partnerships. The programme is focused on countries of the WHO African Region but has also opened the network and programme resources to all hospitals in all regions of the world. It sits within the programmatic area of Global Partnerships for Patient Safety. APPS is concerned with advocating for patient safety as a precondition of health care and catalyzing a range of actions that will strengthen health systems, assist in building local capacity and help reduce medical error and patient harm. The programme acts as a channel for patient safety improvements that can spread across countries, uniting patient safety efforts. APPS has taken place in a dynamic context in which insights are emerging on multiple dimensions of patient safety in African settings and political changes have seen shifts in approaches to patient safety in the United Kingdom. What is clear however is that the published literature on evidence-based patient safety interventions in the African context still lags behind high-income countries. This report highlights that issues and solutions from high income settings cannot simply be applied to African countries, and there is a need to understand the insights presented here from front-line partners to ensure that culture and context are addressed and the necessary adaptation made to existing approaches moving forward.
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Content ArticleThe COVID-19 crisis has created a watershed moment for the NHS, demanding a reappraisal of how essential services are delivered to the public. Even prior to COVID-19, the NHS recognised a pressing need to rethink healthcare using user-centred design principles, based on populations, not organisations. With the advent of the pandemic that pressing need has become an operational imperative. Digital capability has been and will continue to be a key part of transformation, but will only work when aligned with reforms in other key enablers such as financial flow, workforce planning and regulation. Many industries have already made the shift to enabling collaboration and innovation through more agile models of delivery by embracing technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), internet of things (IoT) and/or flexible and secure forms of (multi) cloud storage. Health, on the other hand, until now has introduced new technologies with the objective of improving existing pathways and service delivery models. There is now an opportunity to reimagine healthcare, driving true transformation enabled by digital capabilities.
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Content ArticleTransparent collaborations between patient organisations and clinical research sponsors can identify and address the unmet needs of patients and caregivers. These insights can improve clinical trial participant experience and delivery of medical innovations necessary to advance health outcomes and standards of care. Roennow et al. share their experiences from such a collaboration undertaken surrounding the SENSCIS® clinical trial and discuss its impact during, and legacy beyond, the trial.
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Content ArticleHealthcare worldwide is faced with a crisis of patient safety: every day, everywhere, patients are injured during the course of their care. Notwithstanding occasional successes in relation to specific harms, safety as a system characteristic has remained elusive. Mary Dixon-Woods and Peter J Pronovost propose that one neglected reason why the safety problem has proved so stubborn is that healthcare suffers from a pathology known in the public administration literature as the problem of many hands. It is a problem that arises in contexts where multiple actors – organisations, individuals, groups – each contribute to effects seen at system level, but it remains difficult to hold any single actor responsible for these effects. Efforts by individual actors, including local quality improvement projects, may have the paradoxical effect of undermining system safety. Many challenges cannot be resolved by individual organisations, since they require whole-sector coordination and action. The authors call for recognition of the problem of many hands and for attention to be given to how it might most optimally be addressed in a healthcare context.
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Content ArticleLeaders from across the healthcare system agree that for the LGBTQ+ population to recover and thrive after the COVID-19 pandemic, the way services are designed and delivered, and the workforce environments they are delivered in, must change.
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Content Article
Kate Pym, Managing Director of Pym's Consultancy, discusses the barriers involved in getting an innovative product into the NHS.- Posted
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Content ArticleDespite the application of a huge range of human factors (HF) principles in a growing range of care contexts, there is much more that could be done to realise this expertise for patient benefit, staff well-being and organisational performance. Healthcare has struggled to embrace system safety approaches, misapplied or misinterpreted others, and has stuck to a range of outdated and potentially counter-productive myths even has safety science has developed. One consequence of these persistent misunderstandings is that few opportunities exist in clinical settings for qualified HF professionals. Instead, HF has been applied by clinicians and others, to highly variable degrees—sometimes great success, but frequently in limited and sometimes counter-productive ways. Meanwhile, HF professionals have struggled to make a meaningful impact on frontline care and have had little career structure or support. However, in the last few years, embedded clinical HF practitioners have begun to have considerable success that are now being supported and amplified by professional networks. The recent COVID-19 experiences confirm this. Closer collaboration between healthcare and HF professionals will result in significant and ultimately beneficial changes to both professions and clinical care.
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Content ArticleIn the autumn of 2020, the Care Quality Commission (CQC) looked at how providers were working together in urgent and emergency care (UEC). Winter and the pandemic now place UEC services under exceptional pressure. It's against this context CQC are publishing examples of the innovation and creative approaches they've found so far.
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Content ArticleThe World Health Organization (WHO) has recently published, for consultation, the third draft of its Global Patient Safety Action Plan 2021-2030. In this blog, Patient Safety Learning reflects on areas where our initial feedback in September 2019 has been incorporated into the new draft and where we believe the Action Plan can be further strengthened
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The problem with policies – a blog by Lynne Williams
Lynne Williams posted an article in Improving patient safety
How can we turn the good intentions of a policy into a working model that people use? How can we ensure policies are translated into real, practical solutions? In this blog, Lynne Williams discusses why effective policy implementation is as crucial and important as the content and why we need to look at policies as a collaborative project, headed up by Governance, but written in partnership with the staff that use them to ensure we provide consistent, safe care. -
Content ArticleLast year, the NHS published proposals for new legislation that is intended to reduce the role of competition in the NHS, and increase integration and collaboration between NHS organisations. The Patients Association have now submitted their response, making clear that while they support many of the aims of the proposals, they are deeply concerned about the complete lack of any clear role for patients in the new system. Co-design and co-production should become the default approach in the NHS, but instead the proposals take a traditional, paternalistic approach in which the NHS holds itself separate from patients. The Patients Association are writing to Simon Stevens, Chief Executive of NHS England and Improvement, to make clear that an appropriate role for patients must be included in the new proposals in order for them to be able to support any future legislation.
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Content ArticleThe pursuit of patient safety involves reducing the gap between best practice and the care actually delivered to patients. Understanding how to reliably deliver best practice care using established anaesthetic techniques may, today, be more important than seeking new ones. Advances in anaesthesia safety involve analysing failures and devising strategies to address these. However, anaesthetists do not work in isolation, and their contribution to the function of the multidisciplinary teams in which they work has far-reaching consequences for patient care.
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Content ArticleDelays in evaluation and escalation of needed care can compromise outcomes of the patient significantly and, in many cases, may lead to death. The assembly of a rapid response team would not only provide timely multidisciplinary evaluation of a potentially deteriorating patient, but it would also help reinforce the organization’s culture of collaboration and interprofessional support for safety. Patients often exhibit signs of deterioration before experiencing the adverse event. The rapid response team’s timeliness in evaluation, coupled with the recommendations from multiple, interprofessional individuals, instead of solely the bedside nurse, would significantly prevent a plethora of adverse events and save financial resources. Specifically, the implementation of rapid response teams has been associated with reductions in cardiac arrests, inpatient deaths, and number of days in the hospital. Many healthcare organisations have successfully implemented and sustained improvements with the advent of rapid response teams. These organizations have focused on projects that included establishing standardized calling criteria for both clinicians and patients and family members, and delineating roles and responsibilities for all upon rapid response team arrival. This Patient Safety Movement Actionable Patient Safety Solutions (APSS) provides a blueprint that outlines the actionable steps organisations should take to successfully implement and sustain rapid response teams and summarises the available evidence-based practice protocols.
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Content ArticleWhat does person centred care mean for the role of patients? Fundamentally, it is an ethos that is intended to put users at the heart of services; encouraging a view of them as participants, not patients; active, not passive. This thinking should apply both to people accessing services as individuals and to citizens collectively – and that means the role of patients, and of their voice, is multiple. Chris Graham explores this further in his blog.
