Heartbeat: Therapists making a difference in safety huddles

October 8, 2021

Therapy is an integral part of the safety huddles, making an equal multidisciplinary team contribution as all the other disciplines.

Sophie Whiles, Occupational Therapist (medicine therapy team) told us that safety huddles strengthen the integrated working partnership across all disciplines and provide a platform for her to voice her thoughts. She said: “Safety huddles enable a series of improvements in patient safety via team effort. For example, undertaking proactive medical equipment maintenance; which reduces a significant volume of unnecessary downtime of clinicians, so they can see more patients, provide better care and compliment patient flow. The proactive medical equipment maintenance is likely to provide a positive financial impact to the Trust as well.”

Also from medicine therapy, Team Lead, Hannah Craven-Jenns added: “Our team members cover multiple wards so we are not as visible on one single ward as we would like to be. Safety huddles really help us to be integrated into individual wards, to be part of the team and to work as one team. Through safety huddles, we can bring up essential information in a more structured manner such as patient safety details and other information such as staffing levels. These ‘heads-ups’ (proactive communications) help all of us to be more supportive of each other.”

Sophie Baggott, Clinical Lead for Acute Paediatric Physiotherapy Service agreed entirely that safety huddles are an effective platform to raise any concerns. She said: “Safety huddles are a great opportunity to brief everybody at the same time, and demonstrate a multi-professional integrated approach. We are also involved in the weekly huddles where Lyndon Ground, Priory Ground, Lyndon 1 and CECU get together to work on various quality improvement projects.”

Sophia Parsons, Team Lead for Intermediate Care primarily working with iBeds, told us: “Safety huddles have brought the teams together. They are very informative which helps all disciplines to provide a higher standard of safety to our patients and initiate continuous improvement. We also provide enablement training to iBeds colleagues. We were delighted to discover that anyone who attends the weekly iBeds huddles is treated to tea and a biscuit!”