Patient Safety Officer training helped us introduce safety huddles into ED – New Blog by Sandra Boosey

Sandra Boosey talks to us about developing Safety Huddles at the Emergency Department in Torbay, along with Dr Nick Mathieu ED Consultant, Lisa Houlihan ED Matron, and Tracey Arscott ED Practice Educator.
“We sent a team to the Patient Safety Officer (PSO) Training at the SW AHSN last year, which was amazing. We already had the embryo of our Safety Huddles project before we started, but the PSO training was fantastic in helping give us ideas of how to implement and develop the project. We sent a multi-disciplinary team to the PSO training, rather than sending individuals. We had our improvement leads, a practice educator, a matron and a consultant (who is now our clinical director). While we were on the course we talked a lot about the escalation policies we were working on. These are notoriously difficult to do in an effective way. As part of the PSO course there was a series of videos around good huddles and safety briefings. They were excellent and made us really keen to change the way we did handovers. When we got back from the training, we started off with flipcharts and put down the key things we’d want to discuss at a handover / briefing. We started really quickly after the training and tried to implement all we had learned on the course. After our first flipchart session, we followed up with a new flipchart, and kept repeating this at every session. It was a bit tedious at first manually writing what we wanted to discuss, but we wanted to have many iterations so that we covered everything. We have now purchased a whiteboard to use with the key items printed on there.
What we have found is that this has been a real team effort – we have brought together the whole team. Before, safety briefings were really separate to departments / job roles and information was disseminated in a slightly haphazard way. Now we have an 8 a.m. briefing where we all get together and know what we are going to discuss. We now have a really good way of finding out where staff are working. Before, you’d know where nurses were allocated, but you wouldn’t know which doctor was there. Now, because it’s a team effort, it’s really clear. Also, because the information is all on a board, you are not relying on passing info from colleague to colleague.
It wasn’t rocket science, and we are still continually improving, but this project has really worked for us: It has really changed things for the better and brought us a much better way of communicating.”
We are launching our new learning programme, Patient Safety Launch Pad, for more information click here.