Search the hub

This report will set-out our family engagement process. It will also summarise the feedback received to date from the families who have been involved in HSIB investigations. The purpose is to for HSIB to share their family engagement process with other healthcare organisations involved in patient safety investigations and raise awareness of the value of an effective family engagement process in such investigations. The report will: Describe HSIB’s approach to family engagement in our investigations and what has informed our practice. Describe what has worked well in our approach to family engagement. Summarise what families and staff tell us about our approach. Explain what we have learned and plans for future work.

Recommendations Human factors and behaviour: Each Baby Counts has demonstrated that human factors are recurrent themes that need to be urgently addressed at a systemic level. Research is required to establish how to operationalise learning from this report into practice with improved clinical outcomes. Workload and workforce challenges: Develop and fund an appropriate tool to record current workload and anticipate the obstetric care required for the population. This tool should complement the midwifery acuity tools currently implemented nationally. Research is required to identify safe obstetric staffing standards for the workload and acuity, to guide policy-level changes for the workforce. Communication: All staff must be familiar with using their unit emergency communication and escalation protocols, in particular where emergency buzzers are located and how to activate a switchboard emergency call. This should be mandatory in departmental induction and included in simulated escalation calls during local multidisciplinary team training.

The 2015 Montgomery ruling created practical implications for how clinicians obtain consent and support patients to make decisions about their healthcare. The implication of the Montgomery ruling is that healthcare professionals must: clearly outline the recommended management strategies and procedures to their patient, including the risks and implications of potential treatment options discuss any alternative treatments discuss the consequences of not performing any treatment or intervention ensure patients have access to high-quality information to aid their decision-making give patients adequate time to reflect before making a decision check patients have fully understood their options and the implications document the above process in the patient’s record.

This guideline written by Mid and South Essex Hospitals is designed to help maternity staff to identify, counsel and put the women who need antenatal and postpartum thromboprophylaxis on the correct pathway of care.

Ah – a new year. A new decade. People around the world celebrate such affairs with fireworks, noisemakers, champagne and resolutions they’ll never keep. In America, we revel with all those things and ... the ’Granddaddy of them all‘... The Rose Bowl. The Rose Bowl is an annual college football face-off between two champion teams held in Pasadena, California. The event is huge, complicated, prestigious and widely anticipated. This musing on Rose Bowl activities and how they might highlight safety concepts ‘kicks off’ my 2020 Letter from America series. A renowned part of the franchise is the Tournament of the Roses parade. The 2020 parade theme was the ’Power of Hope‘. Volunteers, sponsors and organisations collaborate to produce a 5.5 mile spectacle involving over 40 floats, numerous marching bands and millions of flowers for viewer enjoyment. Collaboration is key to achieve medication safety too. In a recent 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. Following the pomp and beauty of the parade comes the gridiron... the grit... the sweat... the teamwork. College teams are selected based on their performance during the year. Their individual and team competencies are what get them to Pasadena and give their fans hope for a win. Competencies are important for developing reliability no matter what field you play on. The Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine (SIDM) has identified key competencies that should be considered for inclusion in health professions education programmes to improve the quality and safety of diagnosis in clinical practice. They fill a noticeable gap in health professional education by embedding reasoning and partnering skill development into healthcare curricula. The SIDM approach emphasises individual, team and system level skills to hone clinician diagnostic abilities and orientation to diagnosis as a team. In football and in healthcare, teams follow processes and plans but should be empowered to adapt when the situation calls for it. For example, TeamStepps is a US-government developed team training programme originally designed to enhance communication in acute care. A recent pilot study tested its application in mental health teams in schools to reduce staff burnout and turnover. This unique health environment adapted the TeamStepps method to improve organisational culture and provide support for the wide array of practitioners that provide care in schools. The success of the initiative improved team-based care delivery at the organisation. Football holds for the teams, management and consumers the potential not only for spectacular performance but for mistakes that can result in injury. Fatigue and distractions can often be a factor in football injury on the pitch; so too can these factors result in injury in healthcare. The Pennsylvania Patient Safety Authority (PSA) released a 4-year analysis of newborn falls in the hospital following birth. Parental fatigue was a primary contributory factor that emerged from the investigation. The PSA describes educational tactics to help parents understand the potential risks for infant drops and encourages them to ask for nursing assistance in feeding if they feel overly tired to keep their babies safe. Keeping track of disruptive behaviour is a relatively new effort for healthcare. Until recently, there was no way to raise a flag to indicate poor behaviour that can distract from team cohesion, coordination and communication. In a recent study, a large US health system devised a tool to evaluate disruptive behaviour among its ranks, measure its effect on teamwork, burnout and patient safety, and use that data to define improvement targets. In the sample, researchers found disruptive behaviour to exist in approximately 98% of work settings. The upside of this discouraging figure is that the tool effectively tracked disruptive behaviours so they can be addressed. There is hope for improvement – once a problem can be measured work can commence to fix it. While not a strategy, hope motivates, as presented by Sidney Dekker in his movie: Safety Differently. Hope situates the future in possibility, instils learning from what goes array and sustains efforts to stay true to goals. Let’s keep hope alive as we work to score touchdowns for safety in 2020.

Recommendations include: assess patients for venous thromboembolism (VTE) risk with an easy to use automated scoring system provide the recommended prophylaxis regimen, depending on whether the mother is antepartum or postpartum reassesses the patient every 24 hours or upon the occurrence of a significant event, like surgery ensure that the mother is provided with appropriate VTE prevention education upon hospital discharge.

Currently, stillbirths, neonatal deaths and brain injuries occurring due to incidents in labour are investigated at a local level. The Each baby counts project team will, for the first time, bring together the results of these local investigations to understand the bigger picture and share the lessons learned. From 2015, they began collecting and analysing data from all UK units to identify lessons learned to improve future care. They will then be able to make recommendations on how to improve practice at a national level. This page brings together all of the information and resources about the Each baby counts programme.

Key themes: Situational awareness Handover resources Interruptions and distractions Delegation Task-fixation, helicopter view & closed-loop communication Ask for help.