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Showing results for tags 'Teamwork'.
Found 187 results
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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 Article
NHS: Extraordinary You
Patient Safety Learning posted an article in Workforce and resources
The 55,000 strong healthcare science workforce of the NHS and its related bodies, the Health Protection Agency and NHS Blood and Transplant, represent the largest group of scientists in a single employment sector in the UK. Their vast scientific knowledge and skill base stretches across some 45 scientific specialisms encompassing biology, genetics, physiology, physics and bioengineering. This knowledge lies at the foundation of the profession’s crucial and often unique role in: providing complex and specialist diagnostic services, analysis and clinical interpretation offering direct therapeutic service provision and support introducing technological and scientific advances into healthcare, and undertaking research, development and innovation providing performance and quality assurance, risk management and clinical safety design and management teaching, training and providing a specialist consultancy and clinical advice service to other clinicians with respect to all of the key functions above. The healthcare science workforce plays a critical part in delivering healthcare. More than 80% of all diagnoses are reached with a contribution from healthcare scientists. This document highlights some of these roles. -
Content ArticleBureaucratic organisational culture is less favourable to quality improvement, whereas organisations with group (teamwork) culture are better aligned for quality improvement. In this study, Speroff et al. determine whether an organisational group culture shows better alignment with patient safety climate.
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Content ArticleWard rounds are the focal point for a hospital’s multidisciplinary teams to undertake assessments and care planning with their patients. Coordination of assessments, plans and communication is essential for effective and efficient care. However, the delivery of ward rounds is consistently constrained by the competing priorities of clinical staff. A number of factors contribute to this, including workforce gaps, inadequate planning, unwarranted variation in practice and an absence of training in the skills required to deliver complex multidisciplinary team care. This leads to frustration for staff and patients, and can lead to errors in care, longer stays in hospital and readmissions. A new report from UK healthcare professional leaders including the Royal College of Physicians, and developed along with patients, sets out best practice for modern ward rounds.
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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 ArticleDuring the festive period, Father Christmas has the busiest 24 hours of his year delivering Christmas presents across the world. While this seems an insurmountable task, for him it’s all in a night’s work, facilitated by applying human factors (HF) in many areas. However, as with healthcare, there is always room for reflection, learning and improvement for the benefit of consumers... Feature from Peter A Brennan and Rachel S Oeppen in the BMJ's Christmas 2020: Dr Strange.
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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 ArticleA culture of teamwork and learning from mistakes are universally acknowledged as essential factors to improve patient safety. Both are part of the Comprehensive Unit-based Safety Program (CUSP), which improved safety in intensive care units but had not been evaluated in other inpatient settings.
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Content ArticleThe Comprehensive Unit-based Safety Program (CUSP) aims to improve the culture of safety while providing frontline caregivers with the tools and support that they need to identify and tackle the hazards that threaten their patients at the unit or clinic level. Developed by Johns Hopkins safety and quality researchers, the five-step programme has been used to target a wide range of hazards, including patient falls, hospital-acquired infections, medication administration errors, specimen labeling errors and teamwork and communication breakdowns. Notably, CUSP has been used in national and international quality improvement projects that have drastically reduced hospital-acquired infections. Whether your hospital has participated in such projects or is seeking to adopt CUSP, the Armstrong Institute provides resources to help you run a successful programme.
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Content ArticleThis programme referred to as CUSP is an intervention methodology that will help you to learn from mistakes and improve your team's (and organisation's) safety culture. Watch this Johns Hopkins Medicine's video on CUSP.
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Content ArticleJulius Cuong Pham and Rhonda Wyskie explain the five steps of the Comprehensive Unit-based Safety Program (CUSP) and who should be on the CUSP team. Members of one CUSP team at Johns Hopkins also share their experiences
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Content Article
ARHQ: The CUSP Method
Patient Safety Learning posted an article in Improving patient safety
The Comprehensive Unit-based Safety Program (CUSP) is a method that can help clinical teams make care safer by combining improved teamwork, clinical best practices, and the science of safety. The Core CUSP toolkit gives clinical teams the training resources and tools to apply the CUSP method and build their capacity to address safety issues. A number of toolkits are available to help clinical teams adopt the CUSP method to make care safer. Most teams will want to start with the Core CUSP Toolkit to learn key principles of the CUSP method. Once you’ve learned the basics, additional toolkits can help you target certain safety issues in specific settings of care. Created for clinicians by clinicians, the Core CUSP toolkit is modular and modifiable to meet individual unit needs. Each module includes teaching tools and resources to support change at the unit level, presented through facilitator notes that take you step by step through the module, presentation slides, tools, and videos. -
Content ArticleThe Health Service Executive (HSE) Dublin North East’s Patient Safety Tool Box Talks have been developed to assist with the delivery of key patient safety messages within the workplace. Patient Safety Tool Box Talks© are not a substitute for formal training but rather recognises the need to embed patient safety into the workplace and as such are a support to formal more detailed training programmes. This approach allows the delivery of consistent short customised patient safety messages to staff in a brief intervention as part of a team meeting or at a shift change. The talks are designed to take no more that 5-10 minutes to deliver are capable of being delivered by a non-specialist. If questions however arise beyond the scope of the talk these should be referred to a specialist for clarification. This Tool Box also contains Guidance on Delivering a Patient Safety Tool Box Talk© and a number of talks on a variety of safety topics.
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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 Article
NHS Education for Scotland: Prioritisation matrix
Patient Safety Learning posted an article in Quality Improvement
The Prioritisation Matrix is a structured visual tool to help you decide which improvement ideas to test first and how to focus your activity and energy. It works best in a collaborative environment and can help to build buy-in and communicate why you have chosen to test certain ideas before others. They come in many different forms, but the simplest and easiest to use is the 2 x 2 matrix. The axis of the matrix are usually labelled to enable you categorize the priority of each change idea. Usually the horizontal axis is labelled with a concept such as “effort” or “willingness to adopt”. The vertical axis is usually “impact” or “value”. -
Content Article
NHS Education for Scotland: Project Charter
Patient Safety Learning posted an article in Quality Improvement
A project charter is the statement of scope, objectives and people who are participating in a project. -
Content Article
Effective team-working during the COVID-19 crisis
Claire Cox posted an article in Workforce and resources
Working with Professor Michael West, Affina OD are sharing key principles to support emerging teams and effective team working during this time of uncertainty and ambiguity. Here, he discusses 8 key principles to aid effective team working during the pandemic. -
Content ArticleIn this blog, Steven Shorrock discusses Learning Teams, small group conversations and action, and makes a case for learning in the following ways: talk about everyday work start with what’s strong, not what’s wrong find ways to cross departmental boundaries and get multiple perspectives understand first what can be done by teams.
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Content ArticleThe report, Improving care by using patient feedback, published by the National Institute for Health Research, features nine new research studies about using patient experience data in the NHS. These show what organisations are doing now and what could be done better. Here, we highlight one of the examples from the report, showing some correspondence between a patient and a nursing team.
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Content ArticleA problem solving tool that captures everything you need on one piece of paper. Now that sounds pretty useful. In her latest blog, Sally Howard, Topic Lead for the hub, summarises 'A3', a problem solving tool that does exactly that. She draws on her own experience of using the tool to improve patient outcomes and provides both rich insight and practical examples to help others maximise it's potential.
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Content ArticleThe safe management of a patient’s airway is one of the most challenging and complex tasks undertaken by a health professional - complications can result in devastating outcomes. How can anaesthetists improve safety, prevent complications, and be prepared to manage difficulties when they arise? How, in a crisis, can we ensure that human and technical resources are best utilised? This free course from Future Learn, endorsed by the Difficult Airway Society, will provide answers to these key questions and help you develop strategies to improve patient safety in your area of practice, discussing safe airway management in patient groups and multidisciplinary clinical settings.
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Content ArticleWhen the Harvard Business Review (HBR) asked Robert Sutton for suggestions for its annual list of Breakthrough Ideas, he told them that the best business practice he knew of was 'the no asshole rule'. Sutton's piece became one of the most popular articles ever to appear in the HBR. Spurred on by the fear and despair that people expressed and the tricks they used to survive with dignity, Sutton was persuaded to write this book. He believes passionately that civilised workplaces are not a naive dream, that they do exist, do bolster performance and that widespread contempt can be erased and replaced with mutual respect when a team or organisation is managed right. There is a huge temptation by executives and those in positions of authority to overlook this trait especially when exhibited by so-called producers, but Sutton shows how overall productivity suffers when the workplace is subjected to this kind of stress.
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Content ArticleIncivility chips away at people, organisations, and our economy. Slights, insensitivities, and rude behaviors can cut deeply. Moreover, incivility hijacks focus. Even if people want to perform well, they can't. Customers too are less likely to buy from a company with an employee who is perceived as rude. In this book, Christine Porath shows how people can enhance their influence and effectiveness with civility. Combining scientific research with fascinating evidence from popular culture and fields such as neuroscience, medicine, and psychology, this book reminds managers and employers what they can do right now to improve the quality of their workplaces.
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Content ArticleIn this study published in the Quality Management in Healthcare journal, a community health organisation’s successful method of frontline staff committee engagement generated process changes that culminated in reduced medication errors and increased near misses. Continuous quality improvement initiatives supported by these committees included technical handling and administration of medication, medication reconciliation, and enhancements to standardised treatment protocols.
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Content Article
Letter from America: Kick off to a new year of hope
lzipperer posted an article in Letter from America
Football is a popular American pastime. Its focus on collaboration, individual skill reliance and teamwork serves as a touchpoint for the January 2020 Letter from America. Letter from America is a Patient Safety Learning blog series highlighting fresh accomplishments in patient safety from the United States.
