Partnering to Create the Safest Healthcare System
As your trusted safety partner, we at HIROC are always at the ready to support the HIROC community and our healthcare system with our many valued resources, tools, educational opportunities and events.
More recently, the team at HIROC had yet another idea on how we can partner to impact safety.
We sat down with HIROC’s Carleene Bañez, Senior Healthcare Risk Management Specialist, and her co-collaborators, Katrina Engel, Patient Care Manager, Obstetrics & Obstetrical Clinics, and Silva Nercessian, Patient Care Director, Childbirth and Children’s Services, both from Oak Valley Health, to learn about the Applied Safety Program.
Check out the interview below!
Can you explain what the Applied Safety Program is all about?
Carleene: The Applied Safety Program is a service offered by the Healthcare Safety and Risk Management team at HIROC. This is a partnership with our Subscribers to action patient safety initiatives focusing on areas of higher risk.
An example of an area of higher risk is neonatal and perinatal care or mums and babies. These critical areas of healthcare are dedicated to caring for vulnerable members of our society – newborns and pregnant persons. The Applied Safety Program creates access to additional clinical risk, safety, and human factors practitioners who work in our Subscribers’ healthcare institutions to better understand complex risk areas and action safety initiatives.
Furthermore, such initiatives enable healthcare institutions to build public trust and boost their reputation by illustrating commitment to world-class healthcare standards in these crucial domains. This work is intended to support existing projects and not meant to create any new or additional work for our Subscribers. Our team’s expertise in clinical risk, quality improvement, patient safety and human factors enables us to provide comprehensive boots-on-the-ground support to frontline healthcare providers.
Who was the first Subscriber you partnered with for an Applied Safety Project? What was the problem they were trying to solve and what was the expected outcome?
Carleene: One of our first partners was Oak Valley Health (OVH), an organization that has consistently prioritized patient safety and quality improvement in their Childbirth and Children’s Services program. The goal of the project was to better understand opportunities for interprofessional communication and teamwork for improved patient safety across the program.
What was HIROC’s role and how did HIROC contribute to the project?
Carleene: For this project, the HIROC team engaged healthcare providers in various activities. We facilitated nine focus groups with 44 interdisciplinary team members, conducted staff interviews, and led two workshops with Labour and Delivery and Postpartum participants. The focus groups and interviews were used to gain a thorough understanding of opportunities for improvement across the program and the subsequent workshops were used to brainstorm change ideas focused on transitions of care.
Who was involved from Oak Valley?
Carleene: Our work with frontline healthcare providers included nurses, obstetricians, neonatologists, pediatricians, anesthesiologists, midwives, clerks, and patient support assistants. Throughout the project, we liaised with the manager of Labour and Delivery who helped with project planning and supported activities from a logistics perspective. We also had strong support from the Childbirth and Children’s Services’ Leadership Team.
When did it start, and is it completed?
Carleene: This project started in March 2022 and was completed in August 2022, but the partnership lives on!
If the project with Oak Valley is complete, what’s next?
Carleene: After we completed our collaboration, OVH went on to implement changes. This included daily joint charge nurse meetings to facilitate communication about patient needs across the program. This collaborative work resulted in improved staff engagement surveys across the Childbirth and Children’s Services program. We also had the privilege to co-present with OVH at the 2023 International Symposium on Human Factors and Ergonomics in Health Care and published a joint article.
We are currently collaborating with the same Labour and Delivery team, but this time our focus is on reviewing their current workflows and individual workloads related to obstetrical triage. We’ll share more when this project is published.
What did you personally take away from the project?
Carleene: I’ve worked in patient safety for over 15 years. This project gave me the opportunity to contribute to work that was and is continuing to happen at OVH. I am grateful for the opportunity to be part of this meaningful work and to share a passion for patient safety with OVH’s Labour and Delivery team.
Any general lessons learned you feel other Subscribers would benefit from?
Carleene: A key learning really is that “we are our Subscribers and our Subscribers are us,” and that we are stronger together and to never be uncertain alone – reach out! There were additional benefits of being an external partner to OVH. During our discussions with frontline staff, the feedback we collected was aggregated and analyzed.
Since OVH is a HIROC Subscriber, our support throughout the project was at no additional cost to them. This meant they had extra resources to help with their patient safety initiatives. The project highlights the pivotal role of interdisciplinary teamwork as the key to success in neonatal and perinatal care improvement initiatives. Through this project, healthcare providers learned the importance of fostering open channels of communication, enhancing information sharing, and promoting a culture of mutual respect among various healthcare disciplines. This underscores that improved interprofessional collaboration is not only beneficial but indispensable in achieving better patient outcomes in these critical areas of healthcare.
Our chat with Katrina and Silva from Oak Valley Health
Why did you decide to collaborate and begin working with HIROC with this Applied Safety Projects initiative?
This opportunity provided clear advantages to Oak Valley Health including the ability to have experts in human factors and quality improvement review our processes and support us with solutions. They were able to provide support with initiatives that would otherwise not be available to us including rigorous protocol creation, data collection and data analysis. It was also very helpful to consult with external experts who have training in design thinking methodologies.
Was there a problem you were trying to solve?
Culture, one of the most challenging and nebulous topics to tackle. Our take was that the culture was impacting teams from working harmoniously together and thus impacting patient flow and safety.
How did the team at OVH take to the project? What was their feedback to the work and outcome?
We enjoyed the project! We were appreciative of the environmental scan and focus groups which were completed independent of the leadership team, in an effort to be free from bias, and provided a lot of insight. The design thinking approaches the HIROC team used to generate new ideas from the frontline staff was unique and fun which generated a lot of engagement. This allowed us to work with our end users to develop and implement these solutions using an iterative approach.
Are there any lessons learned you feel other healthcare organizations would benefit from?
Working with the HIROC Applied Safety Program has been hugely beneficial for our team. We were able to work together to make significant changes and have the additional support and expertise that allowed us to publish and share all the great improvements made.
Do you want to learn how your organization can partner with HIROC? Reach out to us at communications@hiroc.com.
By Gillian Brandon-Hart, Communications & Marketing Specialist, HIROC