Heartbeat: Safety huddles – reaching major milestones

May 13, 2022

While our clinical colleagues are driving the implementation of safety huddles, we also have many unsung heroes who work alongside clinical teams, provide a bespoke supporting infrastructure on the rollout and the continuous improvement of safety huddles such as the secondary layer of safety compliance and the pilot of the safety huddles digital screens.

Secondary layer of safety compliance

Prior to the launch of safety huddles, Project and Improvement (P&I) put together a dashboard of the main safety indicators. This dashboard provides individual clinical areas a clear overview of their safety compliance and is highly accessible – just three clicks from the Connect homepage.

Sameer Farooq Mohammed, Business Partner – Corporate, P&I, who leads on the design and development of the safety huddles dashboard shared his journey with us.

“We took a phased approach on the development of the safety huddles dashboard, very much aligned with the ‘Play, Do, Study, Act Cycle’. The first phase was to extract data from the established safety plan, to ensure alignment of safety focuses with the existing Trust reporting mechanism.

“The second phase was launched a few months after. This gap gave colleagues the opportunity to be familiarised with the dashboard thus came up with plenty of new ideas to optimise the utilisation and functions of it, subsequently enhance the outcomes from the implementation of safety huddles.”

Sameer and his team had added a secondary layer of compliance of the safety indicators to the dashboard recently. This secondary layer shows the safety compliance of patients when they were admitted to wards whilst the primary layer shows the compliance when decision to admit (DTA) was made.

Mandy Green, Matron of Surgical Services who has been leading on the implementation of safety huddles in her group added: “The safety huddle dashboard has made a huge difference. The introduction of the button to filter the detail to arrival on ward from DTA is a real game changer, enabling us to focus on specific areas and become a live dashboard.” The next phase of development of the dashboard starts in May.

Safety huddles digital screen

Surgical services are one of the early adopters of safety huddles. Mandy told us: “Safety huddles have made a big difference in focusing on key safety issues within areas. One of the difficulties has been the ability to have the data readily available on a PC.”

In response to Mandy and colleagues’ feedback, the safety huddles project board came up with the idea of repurposing the big digital screens on wards to host the safety huddles dashboard and to feature the associated information with greater accessibility.

Mark Blake from informatics is the designated technical lead of this initiative. Mark carried out a full assessment of the retired eBMS screens at the nominated clinical areas, to understand the feasibility to turn those screens into safety huddles digital screens. Mark produced a comprehensive list of both software and hardware needed to be added per screen, to complete the full reconfiguration package for each clinical area and to bring those screens alive.

Additional measures are in place to ensure data protection. Mark has paired up a designated wireless keyboard and mouse to the big screen that means other keyboards and mice are not operational on the safety huddles digital screen. These designated keyboard and mouse are managed by the ward manager or nurse in charge, to ensure non-authorised individuals would not have access to confidential information.

Priory 2 is the first clinical area to trial the safety huddles digital screen. It was welcomed hugely by ward manager Danielle Graham. Danielle, with her Matrons Mandy and Angela Dudley, are fully embracing the screen to compliment the utilisation of the safety huddles dashboard. Priory 2 gathers the teams together in front of the screen to see their safety compliance directly. Danielle has also started featuring safety focuses, team’s achievements on safety and other important information on the screen. It helps engage colleagues including members from the multiple disciplinary team and the night shift.

Mark and Zurvad Hussain, 2nd Line Manager, Informatics, are currently planning on the rollout of the safety huddles digital screen. The second safety huddles digital screen just became operational on Lyndon Ground and there are more to come. Mark said: “It is really good to see what difference has been made by utilising digital elements effectively on patient safety and staff experience.”

The secondary layer of safety compliance and the safety huddles digital screen are transformational changes yet complimenting each other most effectively.