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Showing results for tags 'Psychological safety'.
Found 192 results
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Content ArticleThe COVID-19 pandemic has placed an enormous strain on health care workers, and its potential impact has implications for the physical and emotional well-being of the workforce. As hospital systems run well over capacity, facing possible shortages of critical care medical resources and personal protective equipment as well as clinician deaths, the psychological stressors necessitate a strong well-being support model for staff. In this commentary, Ripp et al. describe how an MSHS Employee, Faculty, and Trainee Crisis Support Task Force—created in early March 2020 and composed of behavioural health, human resources, and well-being leaders from across the health system—used a rapid needs assessment model to capture the concerns of the workforce related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The task force identified 3 priority areas central to promoting and maintaining the well-being of the entire MSHS workforce during the pandemic: meeting basic daily needs; enhancing communications for delivery of current, reliable, and reassuring messages; and developing robust psychosocial and mental health support options. Using a work group strategy, the task force operationalised the rollout of support initiatives for each priority area. Attending to the emotional well-being of health care workers has emerged as a central element in the MSHS COVID-19 response, which continues to be committed to the physical and emotional needs of a workforce that courageously faces this crisis.
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Content ArticleThe US-based Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) reviewed available evidence for interventions that can help protect staff mental health in the face of extreme working conditions such as natural disasters, terrorist attacks, and previous pandemics. They synthesised this research into evidence-based “psychological PPE” recommendations for use by staff providing care during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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WHO EMRO: Mental health and psychosocial stress
Patient Safety Learning posted an article in Mental health
During the COVID-19 pandemic, you might experience immense pressure and stressors. The World Health Organization has provided an infographic highlighting what stress is, how it might affect you and practical tips on what you can do. -
Content ArticleDr Michael Leonard and Dr Allan Frankel explore how effective leadership and organisational fairness are essential for patient safety within healthcare services. They discuss how leaders can influence their organisations to help create a robust safety culture.
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Amy Edmondson: The importance of psychological safety
PatientSafetyLearning Team posted an article in Staff safety
As a leader how can you foster a work environment where people feel safe to speak up, share new ideas and work in innovative ways? In this video from the Kings Fund, Amy Edmondson, Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, talks about the importance of psychological safety in health and care and what leaders can do to create it. -
Content ArticleThis article from Ashton et al. outlines how one health system in the United States sought to make antibody testing available to staff as a strategy to decrease anxiety and improve sense making around the crisis.
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Content ArticleIn this commentary piece, published in BMJ Leader, Suzanne Shale draws attention to a broader notion of moral injury found in moral philosophy. In this version, a moral wound can be experienced by anyone. It arises from sources that include injustice, cruelty, status degradation and profound breaches of moral expectations. The moral-philosophical version of moral injury associates it with moral and psychological anguish, and feelings such as bewilderment, humiliation and resentment. According to this formulation of moral injury, it could affect patients, service users, families and loved ones as well as care staff. Suzanne highlights that experiences of moral injury among the wider public, as well as staff, will call for attention from care leaders long after the pandemic surge.
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Content ArticleDr Donna Prosser interviews Dr. Albert Wu on the emotional support that we can provide to healthcare workers during this concerning time of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Content ArticleIn her latest blog, Sally Howard talks about psychological types and why understanding our preferences and how they differ to others, can be incredibly valuable. This knowledge can be used to strengthen teams, encouraging people to value diversity and work more effectively together. A particularly useful tool during these challenging times.
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Content ArticleClinical decisions rarely occur in isolation. We must consider the social contexts in clinical environments and draw on theories of social emotion to help us better understand the influence of others’ emotion on our own thoughts, feelings and, ultimately, our ability to deliver safe care. In their Editorial in BMJ Quality & Safety, Jane Heyhoe and Rebecca Lawton explorie the role of social emotion in patient safety and looks at the recent research in this emerging area. They call on the patient safety community to embrace the idea that emotions and emotional contexts exert important impacts on healthcare delivery. Characterising these impacts will inform strategies for supporting staff and delivering safer and more effective care to patients.
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No blame culture, a blog by Joanne Hughes
PatientSafetyLearning Team posted an article in Bullying and fear
In this powerful blog, based on her personal experience of losing a child, Joanne Hughes argues you can (and should) identify and blame the error, the 'act or omission’ for the harm, but very often it is not appropriate or fair to blame the 'person' who carried out that act. Avoidably grieving parents, she highlights, do need to know 'what' is to blame and 'why' it occurred. -
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The real second victims
Patient Safety Learning posted an article in Second victim
In many professions, specific terms – both old and new – are often established and accepted unquestioningly, from the inside. In some cases, such terms may create and perpetuate inequity and injustice, even when introduced with good intentions. One example is the term ‘second victim’. The term ‘second victim’ was coined by Albert W Wu in his paper ‘Medical error: the second victim’. Wu wrote the following: “although patients are the first and obvious victims of medical mistakes, doctors are wounded by the same errors: they are the second victims”. In his blog, Stephen Shorrick discusses the term second victim, what patients and families think of this term, and proposes that healthcare professionals are perhaps the 'third victims'. -
Content ArticleSidney Dekker says when there has been an incident of harm, we need to know "who is hurt, what do they need, and whose obligation is it to meet that need?" In this blog, commissioned by Patient Safety Learning, Joanne Hughes, hub topic lead, develops our understanding of the needs of patients, families and staff when things go wrong. Using Joanne's expertise and informed by her personal experience and engagement with many others who have suffered second harm, this blog discusses the care needs for harmed patients, their families and for staff when things go wrong. It aims to highlight the chasm between what is needed and what is currently delivered.
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Content ArticleAs I mentioned in my previous blog (part 3), the number of staff using the SISOS calm zone as a safe space to take time out was surprising because of the sheer volume and also the average time it was used for (15 minutes). Certain factors contribute to the success of a safe space: management buy-in, location and, to a degree, ambiance. At Chase Farm Hospital, we have been fully supported locally and at a trust level. However, in any organisation there will always be people who are averse to change. In this blog I will share with you some of the negative experiences I encountered, because anyone thinking of setting up a similar initiative needs to be aware that it is not always plain sailing and unfortunately not everyone sees the need to support staff. I will also share with you how SISOS is evolving to meet our staff's needs.
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Learning from excellence (2017)
Claire Cox posted an article in Organisational
Safety in healthcare has traditionally focused on avoiding harm by learning from error. This approach may miss opportunities to learn from excellent practice. Excellence in healthcare is highly prevalent, but there is no formal system to capture it. We tend to regard excellence as something to gratefully accept, rather than something to study and understand. Our preoccupation with avoiding error and harm in healthcare has resulted in the rise of rules and rigidity, which in turn has cultivated a culture of fear and stifled innovation. -
Content ArticleWe tend to think of burnout as an individual problem, solvable by “learning to say no,” more yoga, better breathing techniques, practicing resilience — the self-help list goes on. But evidence is mounting that applying personal, band-aid solutions to an epic and rapidly evolving workplace phenomenon may be harming, not helping, the battle. With “burnout” now officially recognised by the World Health Organization (WHO), the responsibility for managing it has shifted away from the individual and towards the organisation.
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Content ArticleConquer the most essential adaptation to the knowledge economy The Fearless Organisation: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth offers practical guidance for teams and organisations who are serious about success in the modern economy. With so much riding on innovation, creativity, and spark, it is essential to attract and retain quality talent--but what good does this talent do if no one is able to speak their mind? The traditional culture of "fitting in" and "going along" spells doom in the knowledge economy. Success requires a continuous influx of new ideas, new challenges, and critical thought, and the interpersonal climate must not suppress, silence, ridicule or intimidate. Not every idea is good, and yes there are stupid questions and yes dissent can slow things down, but talking through these things is an essential part of the creative process. People must be allowed to voice half-finished thoughts, ask questions from left field, and brainstorm out loud; it creates a culture in which a minor flub or momentary lapse is no big deal, and where actual mistakes are owned and corrected, and where the next left-field idea could be the next big thing. This book explores this culture of psychological safety, and provides a blueprint for bringing it to life. The road is sometimes bumpy, but succinct and informative scenario-based explanations provide a clear path forward to constant learning and healthy innovation. Explore the link between psychological safety and high performance Create a culture where it's "safe" to express ideas, ask questions, and admit mistakes Nurture the level of engagement and candour required in today's knowledge economy Follow a step-by-step framework for establishing psychological safety in your team or organisation Shed the "yes-men" approach and step into real performance. Fertilise creativity, clarify goals, achieve accountability, redefine leadership, and much more. The Fearless Organisation helps you bring about this most critical transformation.
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Rethinking Patient Safety by Suzette Woodward
Claire Cox posted an article in Recommended books and literature
The vast majority of healthcare is provided safely and effectively. However, just like any high-risk industry, things can and do go wrong. There is a world of advice about how to keep people safe but this delivers little in terms of changed practice. Written by Suzette Woodward, a leading expert in the field with over two decades of experience, Rethinking Patient Safety provides readers with a critical reflection upon what it might take to narrow the implementation gap between the evidence base about patient safety and actual practice. This book provides important examples for the many professionals who work in patient safety but are struggling to narrow the gap and make a difference in their current situation. It provides insights on practical actions that can be immediately implemented to improve the safety of patient care in healthcare and provides readers with a different way of thinking in terms of changing behaviour and practices as well as processes and systems. Suzette Woodward shares lessons from the science of implementation, campaigning and social movement methods and offers the reader the story of a discovery. Her team has explored an approach which could profoundly affect the safety culture in healthcare; a methodology to help people talk to each other and their patients and to listen through facilitated safety conversations. This is their story. -
Content ArticleMy previous blog talked about how the idea for SISOS (Safety Incident Supporting Our Staff) – an initiative to support staff involved in safety incidents – came about at Chase Farm Hospital. The SISOS team provide confidential, emotional support in a safe environment and make other support, including professional help more easily accessible. It is important to recognise that we are 'Listeners' and not professional counsellors. My second blog continues this journey.
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Content ArticleSuicide rates for doctors, nurses and allied healthcare workers are rising and being involved in a safety incident increases this risk. The need to support staff when things go wrong is evident. We come to work to do the very best we can for our patients, often ignoring and at the cost of our own health. Most adverse incidents happen, not because we are bad at what we do, but because of system failure. As professionals who care passionately about our work, we blame ourselves when things go wrong. Albert Wu (2000) recognised this phenomenon and coined the term second victim. In this series of blogs I will share my own experiences of setting up and developing Safety Incident Supporting Our Staff (SISOS). In this first blog I explain the catalyst that led to developing SISOS.
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Content ArticleImagine a diverse workplace in which all employees felt a genuine sense of inclusion and belonging. It’s unlikely you work in such an organisation today. But it’s clear that every organisation, public and private sector alike, is increasingly aware of the need to get to work on making this a reality. This article, written by Amy Edmondson and published in Psychology Today, recognises that a diverse workforce and psychological safety go hand in hand for a safer workplace.
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Content ArticleThe COVID-19 pandemic is emerging as the defining health crisis of our generation. Healthcare organisations were already a high-risk environment for workers, who are exposed on a daily basis to the suffering of their patients, tragedy, and the potential for failure. Now, healthcare staff of all kinds are straining to meet the demands of caring for patients with the novel coronavirus. Caring for patients with COVID-19 places them at personal risk for infection, and also poses a threat to their emotional well-being. If workers are not provided with sufficient emotional support, the distress can be disabling. It may render them less able to work to their full ability. This in turn can threaten the integrity of the health care workforce to deliver the volumes of care required by the pandemic. In the longer term individual workers are at risk for accelerated burnout, and for mental health problems like post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The Journal of Patient Safety and Risk Management asked their international editorial board to provide advice for healthcare leaders and managers and frontline clinicians for meeting the emotional needs of healthcare workers and supporting one another. They identified several priority areas central to maintaining and promoting the well-being of the workforce during the pandemic. These included meeting basic needs, improving crisis leadership and communication, promoting well-being, and providing mental and emotional support.
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Content ArticleClaire Cox, Patient Safety Learning's Associate Director of Patient Safety, chats to Harriet Baker, a matron on secondment at Ashford and St Peter's Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, about the Schwartz Rounds model and the positive impact it can have on staff well-being. Harriet explains how to get the ball rolling if you would like to implement Schwartz Rounds locally.
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The right – and duty – of NHS staff to speak up
Hugh Wilkins posted an article in Whistle blowing
A blog from hub topic lead Hugh Wilkins on the recent messages from NHS England and NHS Improvement leaders reminding everyone, including those at board level, of the duty and right of staff to speak up about anything which gets in the way of patient care and their own wellbeing. Hugh highlights the real risk of reprisals against some staff who have raised concerns in the public interest, and points out that much needs to change before NHS staff can be sure that it is safe for them to speak up.- Posted
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Content ArticleAuthor Hugh MacLeod host's this fourth episode in the ISQua Podcast series. "We do not make stuff in healthcare, we deliver care to people through people. When the relationship patterns between people are connected and healthy quality and patient safety magic happens, when they are not connected nor healthy, things fall through the cracks and patient harm and death occurs."
