A Safety Huddle Template for Effective Healthcare Huddles
Safety huddles are a key tool for healthcare organizations to reduce patient harm,
ensure accurate, consistent communication between staff, and promote patient
and employee safety.
In this whitepaper, learn how to conduct effective safety huddles that improve patient outcomes and optimize communication across your organization
To download, fill out form below.
Communication shortcomings among healthcare personnel substantially contribute to medical errors and patient harm. Safety huddles – a method to enhance team communication – are an efficient tool for healthcare teams to share information, review performance, proactively identify safety issues, increase accountability, and ensure that safety checks are built into the system.
Safety huddles enable staff to build a culture of collaboration, quality, and safety.
How Safety Huddles Enhance Care
A safety huddle in healthcare is a quick meeting involving relevant healthcare team members that aims to facilitate team communication and encourage a focus on proactive patient safety.
The overall goal of the safety huddle is to evaluate the previous day’s work to identify any safety concerns and to proactively identify safety issues for the current day. The meetings are meant for information sharing – not solving issues. Concerns discussed during huddles are elevated to the appropriate contact (such as a supervisor or patient safety committee) for resolution.
Huddles have been shown to improve patient and employee safety in a variety of areas such as:
- Wrong-site surgery
- Medication errors
- Hand hygiene
- Unidentified clinical deterioration
- Serious safety events
- Near misses
As the healthcare industry faces staffing shortages unlike ever before, safety huddles are critical to increasing awareness of prior, current and potential risks that affect patients. When new, temporary, and current staff work together, safety huddles empower teams to develop innovative strategies to reduce risks and track effectiveness.
There are countless benefits to safety huddles, when conducted effectively. Benefits of safety huddles include but are not limited to:
- Increasing individual and collective accountability for patient safety
- Designating a fixed time during the shift to focus on care coordination
- Facilitating immediate face-to-face clarification of issues, resulting in fewer interruptions during the remainder of the workday
- Foster a culture of collaboration among team members
Drive High Reliability and a Strong Safety Culture
Despite the increasing importance of safety huddle technology, many healthcare organizations continue to rely on manual processes, which can hinder the efficacy of the safety huddle process.
Performance Health Partners’ centralized patient safety solution streamlines the process of conducting safety huddles by allowing huddle leaders to record notes, add follow-up action items, prepare relevant data and visualizations, and monitor successes. The tool also ensures that all important points of information are recorded and easily accessible to team members.
Let’s Get Started
Equip your team with a safety huddle solution that anyone can learn in minutes, so you can get back to what matters most: delivering quality patient care. Request a free demo with our team to learn more.