Heartbeat: District nurses adapt safety huddles for the community setting
March 11, 2022
While safety huddles are primarily implemented in inpatient areas at many healthcare providers, at SWB we are in the process of rolling out safety huddles throughout the whole patient journey, to provide safety at an enhanced level to all our patients.
The seven district nurse teams started implementing daily safety huddles in the summer of 2021. The concept of multidisciplinary team meetings held at a predictable time was a bit of a challenge for the teams who had to navigate through a safety huddles redesign journey, to ensure the safety huddles are fit for purpose in the community.
Helen Benwell, Team Leader (blue team based at Smethwick), explained: “Logistics was our very first hurdle. We operate from 8am to 8pm, with a team of up to 12 members carrying out home visits across the community. After trialling different times of the day, we all agreed that it is best to attach the safety huddle to the daily handover at 1pm, via Teams.”
Emily Hobbs, Clinical Lead added: “There is a real momentum for the safety huddles, our teams have adapted to it very well and use the opportunity to discuss general safety issues effectively which complements the handover very well.”
District nurse yellow team based at Yew Tree host their safety huddles face to face at 2pm also as part of the daily handover. Team Leader, Zeena Tudor told us it has been quite a journey for the teams to finalise the daily general safety focuses. She said: “It is always our daily routine to highlight any patient safety concerns therefore, we are trying to use safety huddles to streamline and discuss concerns and issues collectively which provides a ‘debrief’ function, helps improve the flow of the day significantly.”
Lone working, family home environment, ongoing safeguarding and senior reviews are also part of the daily safety huddles to ensure staff safety. Trish Collins, Clinical Lead from yellow team further added: “The safety huddle is also a great platform to ‘prompt’ each other, for example, are you regularly doing your LAMP tests?”
Trish, Emily, Zeena and Helen all find safety huddles to be an open and transparent forum to discuss issues that each team member might have and to provide support to each other in a timely manner which, is incredibly important as team members are primarily lone working.
“The pandemic has increased the complexity of some of our home visits,” said Andrew Churm, District Nurse Matron. “Safety huddles have been a great supportive mechanism to provide additional support to all our team members, especially to our new members.
“It has been great to see our team leaders implement the safety huddles into their daily handovers. By doing this they have been able to collect vital data and identify themes that can be taken into their monthly Band 7 forum. This acts as a springboard which accelerates the development and implementation of quality and safety initiatives that will have a direct impact and benefit for the people that we serve.”
The district nurse teams are currently working with the performance and insight team on the development of their safety indicators which will be available on the safety huddles dashboard on Connect shortly. They are already discussing how to utilise the data available on this easy-access dashboard to further improve on the right care, right time, right place to their service users.