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Showing results for tags 'Communication'.
Found 1,212 results
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Content ArticleThis study from Shepard et al. aimed to explore staff perceptions of patient safety in the NHS ambulance services. The authors interviewed 44 participants from three organisational levels, including executives, managers and operational staff. They identified five dominant themes: varied interpretation of patient safety; significant patient safety risks; reporting culture shift; communication; and organisational culture. The findings demonstrated that staff perceptions of patient safety ranged widely across the three organisational levels, while they remained consistent within those levels across the participating ambulance service NHS trusts in England. The findings suggest that participants from all organisational levels perceive that the NHS ambulance services have become much safer for patients over recent years, which signifies an awareness of the historical issues and how they have been addressed. The inclusion of three distinct ambulance service NHS trusts and organisational levels provides deepened insight into the perceptions of patient safety by staff. As the responses of participants were consistent across the three NHS trusts, the identified issues may be generic and have application in other ambulance and emergency service settings, with implications for health policy on a national basis.
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Content ArticleDue to the large numbers of employees who aren’t office based and are offsite for most of their working hours, Yorkshire Ambulance Service (YAS) wanted to improve the ways they could communicate and engage with all staff, including those more dispersed. Through different approaches, YAS developed three schemes: appointed a number of employees as cultural ambassadors; procured and implemented an app called ‘Simply Do Ideas’; and established a range of staff equality networks with the aim of making sure staff from under-represented groups also had their voices heard.
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Content ArticleThis article in the journal Trends in Neurology & Men's Health provides an outline of the role of human factors in preventing harm in healthcare. The authors describe the scale of medical errors and look at some specific ways that changes to personal and team working factors can improve safety for staff and patients.
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Content ArticleThe debate about which is better for learning, listening or talking, highlights one of the reasons why the After Action Review (AAR) can be such a powerful agent of change, as Judy Walker explains in her LinkedIn article.
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Content ArticleIn this article for The BMJ, Partha Kar, consultant in diabetes and endocrinology, looks at the importance of education and peer support in self-management for people with long-term conditions. He looks at how diabetes peer support and education programmes have adapted to the need for remote access during the pandemic, and suggests that increased access to these elements of diabetes care may have helped reduce diabetic ketoacidosis hospital admissions during the first wave of Covid-19.
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Content ArticleSerious pathology as a cause of musculoskeletal (MSK) conditions is considered rare, but it needs to be managed either as an emergency or as urgent onward referral as directed by local pathways. This guidance supports primary and community care practitioners in recognising serious pathology which requires emergency or urgent referral to secondary care in a patient who present with new or worsening MSK symptoms.
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Content ArticleIn this guest blog for the Professional Records Standards Body (PRSB), Taffy Gatawa, Chief Information and Compliance Officer at everyLIFE Technologies, talks about the importance of ensuring that healthcare technologies comply with recognised standards. She discusses everyLIFE's experience on PRSB’s Standards Partnership Scheme, and their journey to implementing standards in their digital products. Taffy describes a process of learning and feedback, achieved through desktop research, clinical reviews and critical engagement with PRSB and customers.
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Content ArticlePersonalised care and support planning (PCSP) is a systematic process based around 'better conversations' between the person and their health and social care practitioners. The aim is to identify what is most important to each person for them to achieve a good life, and to ensure that the support they receive is designed and coordinated around their wishes. It's goal is to empower people to be the main decision-maker in their own care, and to arrive at one plan that encompasses all the person's care needs. This tool has been developed by Think Local Act Personal to support PCSP for people with health and social care needs. Featuring example characters who help bring the process to life, it covers the following stages of the PCSP process: Context Preparation Conversation Record Making it happen Review
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Content ArticleThis video is based on research interviews with acute medical patients and examines how staff and patients in hospital can create safe care together. It includes quotes from real-life patient experiences and highlights the importance of listening to and reassuring patients, and involving them in their care.
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Content Article
Can being open and transparent make us more opaque?
Anonymous posted an article in Florence in the Machine
‘Neo’ is an Allied Health Professional working on the frontline and asks what being open and transparent actually means and whether publishing a report or an investigation is just another tick box exercise if lessons aren't learned. -
Content Article
Safety Chats: Part 2 – Safety as measured
Gina Winter-Bates posted an article in Good practice
In a series of blogs, Gina Winter-Bates, Associate Nurse Director Quality and Safety at Solent NHS Trust, shares her experience of implementing Safety Chats. In her first blog, Gina explained what motivated her to introduce Safety Chats into her Trust. In part 2, Gina reflects on how we know we are safe and the safety measures her Trust has put in place. -
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This is part of our new series of Patient Safety Spotlight interviews, where we talk to people about their role and what motivates them to make health and social care safer. Lou worked in family liaison for the police service for thirty years, and she talks to us about how this experience is helping her develop family engagement services at the Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch (HSIB). She describes the importance of valuing the voices of patients and their families, and the vital role of their input in improving safety in the healthcare system. She also talks about the challenges the Covid-19 pandemic posed to HSIB's family engagement work, and how speaking to patients and their families is being increasingly valued and professionalised by the healthcare system. -
Content ArticleEvery place has its unwritten rules, whether a community or a workplace. But how do we know the culture of a place? It's pretty much impossible until we experience it for ourselves. Jennifer L. Lycette shares her own experience of organisational culture during her medical training.
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Content ArticleAs a role model or champion, feeling empowered to talk about hand hygiene to a range of colleagues is important. The World Health Organization has collated a number of hand hygiene improvement tools. These tools prime people to be able to unite to ensure clean hands by acting on the contents of these resources that support hand hygiene improvement in the context of organisational safety climate or culture change. They apply to a wide range of people working in health care.
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Content Article
Safety Chats blog series: Part 1
Gina Winter-Bates posted an article in Good practice
In a series of blogs, Gina Winter-Bates, Associate Nurse Director Quality and Safety at Solent NHS Trust, shares her experience of implementing Safety Chats. In this first blog, Gina explains what motivated her to introduce Safety Chats into her Trust. -
Content ArticleIn this BMJ article, Caitríona Cox and Zoë Fritz argue that outdated medical language that casts doubt, belittles, or blames patients jeopardises the therapeutic relationship and is overdue for change.
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Content ArticleBefore a patient undergoes a medical procedure such as surgery, they need to give their consent, having been informed about the details of the procedure and associated risks and benefits. However, in spite of the development of clear guidance on informed consent, many patients still feel nervous or unsure about asking questions and raising concerns during the consent process. Beginning with a personal account that highlights the importance of a thorough and meaningful consent process, this article in The BMJ by Tessa Richards, Associate Editor, examines the issues faced by both doctors and patients in achieving truly personalised informed consent.
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Content ArticleDaily huddles with staff are used to support incident reporting and learning in healthcare. This study considers a Safety-II-inspired model for safety huddles developed and implemented at the Neonatal Care Unit at a regional hospital in Sweden.
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Content ArticleThis guide is designed to support healthcare providers when talking to patients about the use of of oxytocin to start or advance labour.
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Content ArticleProcesses relating to communication between healthcare professionals are complex and vulnerable to breakdown. In the electronic health record (EHR)-enabled healthcare environment, providers rely on technology to support and manage complex communication processes, and if implemented and used correctly, EHRs have potential to improve safety. This clinician communication self-assessment guide aims to help healthcare professionals determine how safe their practice is in relation to electronic health records (EHR) and communication.
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Content ArticleThis infographic accompanies the TeamSTEPPS for diagnosis improvement course from the US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).
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Content ArticleTimely written communication between primary and secondary healthcare providers is paramount to ensure effective patient care. In 2020, there was a technical issue between two interconnected electronic patient record (EPR) systems that were used by a large hospital trust and the local community partners. The trust provides healthcare to a diverse multiethnic inner-city population across three inner-city London boroughs from two extremely busy acute district general hospitals. Consequently, over a four-month period, 58,521 outpatient clinic letters were not electronically sent to general practitioners following clinic appointments. This issue affected 27.9% of the total number of outpatient clinic letters sent during this period and 42,251 individual patients. This paper from Patel et al. describes the structure, methodological process, and outcomes of the review process established to examine the harm that may have resulted due to the delay.
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Content ArticleRepeated culture of safety surveys of the nursing staff at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s main campus demonstrated lagging scores in the domain of nonpunitive responses to error. The hospital had tried for many years to address the problem using a variety of strategies, including small group training sessions on just culture for staff and leaders, but had met with limited success. Finally, in 2015, it committed to trying something genuinely different—even perhaps disruptive—that might actually shift the stagnant metrics. Their novel, multifaceted programme, implemented over a two-year period, yielded a 13% increase in staff rating scores that the hospital has been able to sustain over the subsequent two-year period. The design and rollout of our program was neither simple nor smooth, but valuable lessons were learned about realistic, operational implementation of principles of psychological safety in a large and complex clinical organisation. In this paper, Neiswender et al. describe the programme and the lessons learned in the journey from idea inception to post-implementation.
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Content ArticleSerious case reviews from the past twenty years have repeatedly highlighted the absence of professional curiosity as a core failing in the actions of health and social care professionals. However, 'professional curiosity' as a term is still not commonly used amongst healthcare professionals and there is no shared understanding of its meaning. This paper published by Diabetes on the Net, critically reviews current research surrounding professional curiosity and discusses the main themes. explores how inter-agency working can promote professional curiosity by supporting healthcare professionals to overcome the complex barriers that may arise during safeguarding cases. It discusses the role of Children and Young People’s diabetes clinics as an ideal platform for utilising the benefits of professional curiosity.
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Content ArticlePicker, an international charity working across health and social care, have published the results of their National Cancer Patient Experience Survey. Almost 60,000 people responded to the survey, which was coordinated by Picker on behalf of NHS England and conducted between October 2021 and February 2022. The survey included people aged 16 years and over with a confirmed primary diagnosis of cancer and who had been treated in hospital between April and June 2021.
