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Showing results for tags 'Staff support'.
Found 863 results
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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 Article“Freedom to Speak Up requires leadership commitment throughout the health and care system,” writes Dr Jayne Chidgey-Clark in a blog for the Health Service Journal. “In this way, we can foster the speak up, listen up, follow up culture, which will give workers, and ultimately those who use our services, the health and care sector they deserve.” She encourages all senior leaders to under take training to understand their role in forster a good speaking up culture that promotes organisational learning and improvement.
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Content ArticleDespite many investigations and inquiries into violent incidents in mental health settings, resulting in reports and guidelines, safety considerations for mental health staff continue to be an issue of serious concern. This report from the Royal College of Psychiatrists attempts to address the safety needs of psychiatrists. Psychiatrists from different disciplines are likely to be exposed to different degrees of threat to their safety, but no particular branch of psychiatry is immune. In the same vein, the context in which psychiatric practice is delivered will also have a bearing on the likelihood of violence, be it on in-patient units, in out-patient settings, in accident and emergency departments, in prisons and other custodial institutions, or in patients’ homes.
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Content ArticleThe Dr. Lorna Breen Health Care Provider Protection Act in the USA aims to reduce and prevent suicide, burnout, and mental and behavioural health conditions among healthcare professionals. Healthcare professionals have long experienced high levels of stress and burnout, and COVID-19 has only exacerbated the problem. While helping their patients fight for their lives, many health care professionals are coping with their own trauma of losing patients and colleagues and fear for their own health and safety. This bill helps promote mental and behavioural health among those working on the frontlines of the pandemic. It also supports suicide and burnout prevention training in health professional training programs and increases awareness and education about suicide and mental health concerns among health care professionals.
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Content ArticleBoth the US Senate and the House of Representatives passed a bill to “improve the mental and behavioral health among health care providers” that President Biden signed on Friday. The Dr Lorna Breen Health Care Provider Protection Act is named after Lorna Breen, a New York City emergency medicine physician who died by suicide in April 2020, as Covid-19 raged across the city and the country. By all accounts a tireless worker, she was ultimately overwhelmed by what she experienced during those dark early days of the pandemic. Even before the coronavirus pandemic, health care institutions were struggling with maintaining the wellness of their workforces. Rates of burnout, depersonalisation, and emotional exhaustion were all significantly higher among healthcare workers than in the general population. Even more alarming, physicians and nurses complete acts of suicide at rates significantly higher than workers in other professions. The pandemic added fuel to this fire, as healthcare workers fought to provide care to legions of sick patients amid staffing and equipment shortages. Before the pandemic, approximately 40% of health care workers reported feeling burnt out. Now, between 60% and 75% of US healthcare workers report feeling emotionally drained and depressed. Clearly, something has to change. With the Breen bill, Congress hopes to halt this tragic wave of depression and burnout among health care workers by providing grants to hospitals and other health care organisations to “promote mental health and resiliency among health care providers.” Yet the solution the Breen bill proposes will not lead to meaningful change. Giving hospitals money to “promote wellness” will not magically heal healthcare workers. During the pandemic, hospitals across the country put up signs lauding their workers as heroes. Though hospital administrators may have given themselves pats on the back for such efforts, the signs meant little to those working without adequate personal protective equipment, or telling family members they could not visit dying loved ones, or wondering if they'd bring Covid home to their families and friends. The signs haven’t stopped scores of workers from leaving the healthcare field.
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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. -
Content ArticleThe Safety Engineering Initiative for Patient Safety (SEIPS) is arguably the best known and most published systems-based Human Factors framework in healthcare worldwide. Developed by Professor Pascale Carayon and colleagues in the University of Wisconsin, the SEIPS framework is partly based on Donabedian’s well-known Structure-Process-Outcome model of healthcare quality. SEIPS is strongly grounded in a Human Factors based systems approach.
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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 ArticleThe Safety culture programme group (SCPG) was a virtual task and finish group established in July 2021 for six sessions to provide recommendations to support and enable organisations to improve their safety culture through embedding a continuous cycle of understanding the issue, developing a plan, delivering the plan and evaluating the outcome with an underpinning foundation of inequalities reduction. This report contains an overview of the discussions undertaken by the Safety culture programme group (SCPG) in 2021. It also includes their recommendations so that safety culture continues to be developed as one of the foundations that underpins the NHS patient safety strategy.
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Content ArticleThe Culture Change Toolbox is a collection of tools and interventions for changing culture. It’s full of ideas, examples, and exercises. For each tool there are tips on how to apply it and a description of which components of culture it helps to improve. This latest version includes: the latest evidence on culture change a refreshed format with an improved flow for learning new activities and resources for teams examples from across the continuum of care.
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Content ArticleFrom April 2023 the new Health Services Safety Investigations Body will require doctors to be candid about errors that have led to patient harm. But can medics trust that material given in this “safe space” won’t be used against them?
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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 ArticleIn this blog, Jeremy Hunt MP, Founder of Patient Safety Watch, outlines six priorities for the new Health Secretary, Therese Coffey MP. He argues that these patient safety priorities will help reduce elective and emergency pressures and save money.
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Content ArticleIn this article in the Patient Safety Journal, Mayher Profita, a third-year surgical resident in Pennsylvania, describers her residency and the burnout she experienced. "The burnout was making us care less about our patients and the care they received and more about whether we made the right career choice."
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Content ArticleIn this blog, Bob Matheson, Head of Advice and Advocacy at the charity Protect, explains the case of Dr Chris Day and how it highlights the vital importance of reforms to UK whistleblowing law. Protect is campaigning for Reform of whistleblowing legislation in the UK. The author highlights loopholes in UK law that Dr Day has faced throughout his long legal battle with Health Education England (HEE). These gaps mean that whistleblowers lack certain important legal rights and protections, and this in turn may prevent individuals from raising concerns.
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Content Article
In this blog for the hub, Julia Wood explains why Joy in Work is so important, how you can implement it into your team ensuring you and your colleagues are happier at work, and why a happier team will improve patient care. -
Content Article
NHS East London: Enjoying work project posters
Patient Safety Learning posted an article in Good practice
Here are some useful projects that NHS East London teams from each directorate took part in as part of demonstrating what they have learned from Cohort 3 of the Enjoying Work Learning System. -
Content ArticleThe Government's Race Disparity Unit has published data relating to NHS staff reports of discrimination at work. The charts, tables and commentary on this page cover survey data from 2019, and the data from 2020 is available to download without commentary. 300 NHS organisations took part in the staff survey in 2019, including 229 NHS trusts.
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Content Article
Why everyone needs a coach - Atul Gawande (TED2017)
Patient Safety Learning posted an article in Motivating staff
How do we improve in the face of complexity? Atul Gawande has studied this question with a surgeon's precision. He shares what he's found to be the key: having a good coach to provide a more accurate picture of our reality, to instill positive habits of thinking, and to break our actions down and then help us build them back up again. "It's not how good you are now; it's how good you're going to be that really matters," Gawande says. -
Content ArticleScrutiny of NHS chief executive officers (CEOs) has tended to focus on the generally short tenure of their position. The implications of high turnover have been assessed but there has been limited research looking at CEOs who remain in post for long periods, whether in the same organisations or in multiple ones. This study by researchers from the University of Manchester draws on interview data collected in 2019 with 10 long serving CEOs in the English NHS, with an average tenure of 17 years.
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Content ArticleAnnual NHS Staff Survey results show an average decline in those feeling optimistic about their career within the NHS. One area of concern, in particular, was the amount of NHS workers who felt they were not adequately recognised and rewarded. This poses a threat to the healthcare provider’s People Promise. As part of the NHS’ People Promise, one of the key values include: ‘we are recognised and rewarded. At a time when much of the NHS is suffering from staff shortages, it is vital to find solutions to boost employee morale. Following this report from Each Person, the NHS has highlighted two key areas that need to be addressed to combat staff dissatisfaction: continuing their advocacy for increased investment and support to raise staff numbers; and relieving points of pressure to foster a positive working culture across the organisation. Consequently, NHS trusts have taken positive steps to ensure that their employees feel more appreciated for their hard work through rewards and recognition.
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Content ArticleThe UK has fewer hospital beds than almost any other European comparator and we can ill afford any loss of hospital capacity. While Covid has undoubtedly worsened performance, crowding in emergency departments was a problem before the pandemic. There are frantic attempts to shore up battered and fragile rotas and rota coordinators are scratching their heads. Meanwhile there has been a steady increase in the number of staff off work with Long Covid. While many have been flexible and accommodating to try to maintain their services, there is increasing burnout and uncertainty as to when all this will end. The workforce needs to feel valued and supported, writes Adrian Boyle, a consultant in emergency medicine. There needs to be an acknowledgment that the system is broken.
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Content Article
Wessex LMCs Podcasts
Patient Safety Learning posted an article in Recommended video and audio resources
Wessex LMCs podcasts share good ideas, challenge your thoughts and introduce you to interesting people and projects all to support you in your work in general practice. -
Content Article
Nuffield Trust: Safety culture in the NHS (25 August 2022)
Mark Hughes posted an article in Culture
A good safety culture in healthcare is one that includes value and respect for diversity, strong leadership and teamwork, openness to learning, and staff who feel psychologically safe. In this article the Nuffield Trust use data from the NHS Staff Survey to look at safety culture in the NHS.
