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Showing results for tags 'Communication'.
Found 1,212 results
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Community Post
How does it feel to work in a toxic culture and what impact it has on patient safety
HelenH posted a topic in Bullying and fear
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We know that blame and fear is toxic. It makes working in healthcare unsafe for staff and is a huge barrier to patient safety - staff won’t share what goes wrong if they expect not to be listened to or worse, will be criticised or blamed for errors that are really attributable to unsafe systems. It would be really valuable to better understand how this feels and the impact it has on clinicians and the safety of patients and service users.- Posted
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Content ArticlePatient engagement refers to “meaningful and active collaboration in governance, priority setting, conducting research and knowledge translation,” where patient partners are members of the teams, rather than participants in research or those seeking clinical care. It appears more has been written on the benefits rather than the risks of patient engagement and the authors in this study feel it is important to document and share what they call ‘patient engagement gone wrong.’ The authors anonymised these examples and sorted them into four statements: patient partners as a check mark, unconscious bias towards patient partners, lack of support to fully include patient partners, and lack of recognizing the vulnerability of patient partners. These statements and their examples are meant to show that patient engagement gone wrong is more common than discussed openly, and to simply bring this to light.
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Content ArticleThis blog (attached below) explores how far the nature of our relationships at work have an impact on patient safety. Lesley Parkinson – the executive director of Restorative Thinking, a social enterprise working to introduce and embed restorative and relational practice in the NHS and across public sector organisations – explores how six restorative practice habits add value in multiple teams and scenarios. You can also order Lesley's book Restorative Practice at Work Six habits for improving relationships in healthcare settings.
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Content ArticleThis factsheet from the General Medical Council sets out some of the key legislation and case law relating to medical decision making and consent in the UK. It is not intended to be a comprehensive list, nor is it a substitute for independent, up-to-date legal advice.
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Content ArticleI this article for the Institute for Health Improvement, Rachel Hock highlights some of the safety concerns and issues that can arise through discriminatory attitudes and stigma associated with weight.
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Content ArticleThe International Alliance of Patients’ Organizations (IAPO) is an alliance of patient groups in official relationship with the WHO and is representing the interests of patients worldwide IAPO P4PS Observatory is a single-point global platform for gathering and analysing patients’ expertise and experience to feed evidence to the national, regional and global policies aimed at improving patient and quality of care for patients by the patients.
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Content ArticleAs a doctor, receiving a letter from the GMC confirming that a complaint has been raised against you by a patient, and the GMC are now investigating that complaint, can be a frightening experience. This blog by solicitor Nicola Wheater, looks at how communication failings can lead to GMC complaints and describes what to expect from the process. She also highlights support available for doctors facing a GMC complaint.
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Content Article
Using patient stories to reflect on care (2016)
Patient Safety Learning posted an article in Patient stories
There is an increasing emphasis on, and commitment to, using patient narratives in nursing practice and nurse education. Listening to the voices of those receiving our care is just the beginning. The challenge is to use these narratives to improve practice and the patient experience. This seven-part series in the Nursing Times presents narratives from three fields of nursing: adult, mental health and learning disability. Each article includes opportunities to reflect on the stories presented and consider their implications for practice. -
Content ArticleThis opinion piece in the Journal of Eating Disorders looks at the use of the diagnosis 'terminal anorexia' and its impact on people with anorexia nervosa, their families and the healthcare professionals working with them. Alykhan Asaria offers a lived-experience perspective on how the term may cause distress and harm to patients, feeding the narrative power of an individual's eating disorder. The article also talks about how the term can remove hope from patients, families and clinicians, and how it might set a dangerous precedent in paving the way for people with other mental health conditions to be labelled 'terminal'.
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Content ArticleTrust is central to the therapeutic relationship, but the epistemic asymmetries between the expert healthcare provider and the patient make the patient, the trustor, vulnerable to the provider, the trustee. The narratives of pain sufferers provide helpful insights into the experience of pain at the juncture of trust, expert knowledge, and the therapeutic relationship. While stories of pain sufferers having their testimonies dismissed are well documented, pain sufferers continue to experience their testimonies as being epistemically downgraded. This kind of epistemic injustice has received limited treatment in bioethics. In this paper, Buchman and colleagues examine how a climate of distrust in pain management may facilitate what Fricker calls epistemic injustice. They critically interrogate the processes through which pain sufferers are vulnerable to specific kinds of epistemic injustice, such as testimonial injustice. They also examine how healthcare institutions and practices privilege some kinds of evidence and ways of knowing while excluding certain patient testimonies from epistemic consideration.
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Content ArticleDehydration can be a significant risk to people taking certain medicines. These Sick Day Rules cards aid patients in understanding the medicines they should stop taking temporarily during illness which can result in dehydration, such as vomiting, diarrhoea and fever. They are intended for use as a tool to support conversations between healthcare professionals and patients about their medicines and dehydration.
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Content ArticleOver time and across the world, the need to be transparent with patients and families when care has not gone well is now recognised as a key element of high-quality, safe and patient-centred healthcare. However, a significant gap still persists and some organisations have yet to welcome a transparent and accountable approach, while others fail to turn these principles into reliable actions. This editorial in BMJ Quality & Safety highlights the vulnerable position patient and families are in after error disclosure and looks at how data on processes around error disclosure are key to improvement. The authors call for healthcare organisations to redouble their engagement with patients and families who have been harmed by their healthcare and use the principles of accountability, compassion and transparency to drive their response.
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Adverse incidents arising from suboptimal healthcare are a major cause of worldwide morbidity and mortality. Arriving at an understanding of the conditions under which adverse incidents occur has the potential to improve the safety of healthcare provision. Staff working in the NHS have been contributing their experiences via a narrative data capture platform – SenseMaker – to help gain contextual insights on a wide range of topics under exploration by the NHS Horizons team. This blog by Rosanna Hunt (Senior Associate, NHS Horizons) in collaboration with Lizzy MacNamara (Junior Research Consultant, The Cynefin Co.) and Taj Nathan (Consultant Forensic Psychiatrist, Cheshire & the Wirral Partnership Foundation Trust) describes how the SenseMaker® platform could be used to extract staff experiences on the topic of patient safety incidents both reported and unreported by staff, and the facilitated conversations that would be needed to transform the data into actionable insights and commitment to change. -
Content ArticlePersonalised Care will benefit up to 2.5 million people by 2024. It aims to give people the same choice and control over their mental and physical health that they have come to expect in every other aspect of their life. Personalised care is based on ‘what matters’ to people and their individual strengths and needs. This webpage by NHS England contains information about the following aspects of personalised care: Patient choice Shared decision making Patient activation and supported self-management Social Prescribing and community based support Personalised care and support planning Personal health budgets
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Content Article
Language Matters pocket guides (April 2023)
Patient-Safety-Learning posted an article in Diabetes
The language used by healthcare professionals can have a profound impact on how people living with diabetes, and those who care for them, experience their condition and feel about living with it day-to-day. At its best, good use of language; verbal, written and non-verbal (body language) which is more inclusive and values based, can lower anxiety, build confidence, educate and help to improve self-care. On the other hand, poor communication can be stigmatising, hurtful and undermining of self-care and have a detrimental effect on clinical outcomes. Language Matters Diabetes is a global movement that aims to improve the way in which healthcare professionals and wider society talks about and to people with diabetes. These three pocket guides for different groups aim to address use of language about diabetes and people with diabetes in order to improve experiences of care and tackle stigma. Language Matters pocket guide: Healthcare professionals Language Matters pocket guide: Parents and families Language Matters pocket guide: Media and social media -
Content Article
NHS Horizons: Complexity research
Patient Safety Learning posted an article in Techniques
NHS Horizons uses SenseMaker to gather and analyse stories of real-time, day-to-day experiences to facilitate improvement in complex environments. SenseMaker is the complexity research tool that enables not only the mass data collection of rich and deep descriptions of people’s experiences, but also uses a framework incorporating “triads” and “dyads” to allow participants to categorise what their stories mean to them. The process starts with a SenseMaker survey (or a series of surveys) and ends with a Sensemaking workshop. -
Content ArticleGaslighting at work can take many forms and is often subtle, causing the victim to question their perception. This blog gives some examples of gaslighting at work and suggests ways to deal with it if you believe you are experiencing gaslighting from a colleague.
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Age-Friendly Health Systems (AFHS) is an initiative that aims to follow evidence-based practices while minimising harm in older patients. The evidence-based elements of high-quality care are known as the 4Ms: What Matters Medication Mentation Mobility During the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, a team from the Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) decided to examine the equity of their care for older adults. The resulting study published about the age-friendly work at OHSU is the first to include data about health equity as part of AFHS outcomes and illustrates the importance of creating equitable care at clinical and institutional policy levels. This blog looks at the process the team went through to assess and collect data about age-related equity. -
Content ArticleGetting a GP appointment is often a challenge at the moment, but for many disabled people, access to their GP has long been a problem. The King's Fund explored disabled people’s experiences of involvement in health and care design, their experiences accessing health and care, as well as of involvement in service design. Some participants described the significant difference a GP could make: those who made someone feel listened to and validated, compared with GPs who dismissed concerns or spoke to a person’s personal assistants rather than directly to them.
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Content ArticleThe Royal United Hospital Bath NHS Trust project tested different ways to communicate with staff about patient safety, to encourage the reporting of incidents and to promote a learning culture.
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Content ArticleGood patient communication strategies are an essential prerequisite for developing an effective NHS patient safety culture and the NHS needs to improve on its efforts, writes John Tingle in an article for the British Journal of Nursing.
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Content ArticleData from NHS Resolution indicates that the number of claims with a primary cause of ‘Fail to warn - Informed consent’ have increased from 128 to 248 claims per year in 2011–2012 and 2021–2022 respectively. This letter in the British Journal of Surgery highlights the impact of failures in both the process and documentation of informed consent. The writers call for further research to investigate unwarranted variation in claims and develop processes to standardise and improve the quality of consent.
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This is part of our series of Patient Safety Spotlight interviews, where we talk to people working for patient safety about their role and what motivates them. Paul talks to us about how AvMA helps people who have suffered direct or indirect medical harm and to help them to seek justice, why upcoming changes to the legal system could restrict access to clinical negligence claims and the importance of compassionate engagement in improving harmed patients’ experiences of the healthcare system. -
Content ArticlePublished in BMC Health Services Research, this is the first review to theorise how open disclosure (OD) works, for whom, in what circumstances, and why. Authors identify and examine from the secondary data the five key mechanisms for successful OD and the three contextual factors that influence this. The next study stage will use interview and ethnographic data to test, deepen, or overturn their five hypothesised programme theories to explain what is required to strengthen OD in maternity services.
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In this interview, we speak to sociologist Dr Marieke Bigg about why she decided to write her debut non-fiction This won’t hurt: How medicine fails women. Marieke discusses how societal ideas about the female body have restricted the healthcare system’s approach to women’s health and describes the impact this has had on health outcomes. She also highlights areas where the health system is reframing its approach by listening to the needs of women and describes how simple changes, such as allowing women to carry out their own cervical screening at home, can make a big difference.
