The Improvement Academy (IA) based at the Bradford Institute of Health Research is celebrating 10 years of its flagship Huddle Up for Safer Healthcare (HUSH) programme: an evidence-based intervention that has consistently demonstrated significant improvement in staff teamworking, improved team communication, job satisfaction and safety culture, and a reduction in patient harm.
HUSH provides a structured approach for implementing safety huddles in healthcare settings and encourages all team members (clinical and non-clinical) to come together briefly every day with a focus on an area of harm. The shared knowledge at the huddle improves situational awareness and teamwork, thus reducing patient harm as harms are anticipated and prevented and errors are learnt from.
The IA is the implementation arm of ARC Yorkshire and Humber and in the last 10 years the it has been studying and supporting the implementation HUSH safety huddles in a variety of settings and despite challenging times, including a pandemic, teams have achieved amazing results!