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Resources

Teamwork & communication

  • TED Tool: Team Engagement and Development (TED) is a practical, evidence-based toolkit designed to help teams understand how effectively they work together and take action to improve. At its core is an online survey measuring eight dimensions of team engagement and effectiveness, supported by over 80 tools and guides to drive meaningful conversations and positive change. Originally developed at Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust to improve staff engagement, TED has become an integral part of their culture, delivering sustained improvements over five years. Now supported by NHS England, TED is being shared more widely to help teams across the NHS build stronger, more connected, and higher-performing workplaces.
  • SBAR communication tool – NHS England: SBAR is an easy to use, structured form of communication that enables information to be transferred accurately between individuals. SBAR was originally developed by the United States military for communication on nuclear submarines, but has been successfully used in many different healthcare settings, particularly relating to improving patient safety.
  • CUSS Communication Tool – S.A.F.E: Cuss is a technique that uses a graded assertiveness approach to communicating.
  • Teach or Treat – RCOG: Teach or Treat is a communication strategy which encourages a discussion about the clinical situation being escalated: initiating a kind, quick and respectful response.
  • Handovers and huddles: a framework for practice in maternity units – NHS England: This document provides a structure for maternity units to create and develop their own approach to effectively communicating clinical data and transferring key safety information. It describes the difference between handovers and huddles, the benefits of effective clinical handovers and the role of huddles in promoting safety.
  • Workplace Behaviour Toolkit – RCOG: The toolkit includes tools to: – support the development of positive workplace culture – support you when you encounter poor workplace behaviours – strengthen your skills and confidence in ‘speaking up’ – promote an understanding of what poor workplace behaviour looks like and its impact on individuals, teams, organisations and importantly the women and families we care for

Safety and culture improvement

  • Introducing COMPASS: A new safety tool to help understand the impact of culture on patient safety: Organisational culture plays a vital role in patient safety — yet there’s no consistent way to assess its impact. To change that, COMPASS has been developed.  COMPASS has been developed based on the work of the Patient Experience Library (PEL), who conducted a literature review of avoidable harm enquiries over 10 years, including the East Kent, Morecombe Bay and Mid Staffordshire reports.  COMPASS is a new tool designed to help safety investigators capture, analyse, and feedback insights about culture. Learn how the pilot of12 NHS trusts aims to support cultural learning and improve safety across healthcare.
  • Five top tips for using safety culture surveys | The Health Foundation: Everyone’s talking about safety culture in the NHS — but what does it look like in practice? Frontline teams share their experiences and top tips on using safety culture surveys to understand, measure, and improve safety where it matters most.
  • Improving patient safety culture – a practical guide – NHS England: In considering the safety culture of where we work we often separate out ‘what’ work we do from ‘how’ we work. This can lead to a disconnect and lead to ‘how’ we work not transferring into the ‘what’ we do. By considering the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ as two intertwined threads where each is necessary to provide a strong team, we can see that unless we give them equal attention the overall strength of it will weaken. We hope that this ‘toolkit’ will give teams an understanding of how to craft, create and nurture a positive safety culture and provide a theoretical underpinning to how to shift the culture.
  • Learn from patient safety events (LFPSE) – NHS England: The Learn from Patient Safety Events (LFPSE) service is a national NHS service for the recording and analysis of patient safety events that occur in healthcare.
  • Patient Safety Leadership WalkRounds – IHI: Senior leaders are encouraged to use weekly Patient Safety Leadership WalkRounds™ to demonstrate their organization’s commitment to building a culture of safety. WalkRounds™ are conducted in patient care departments. They provide an informal method for leaders to talk with front-line staff about safety issues in the organization and show their support for staff-reported errors. This tool provides key elements for successful implementation of WalkRounds™ and sample formats and questions to ask staff.
  • Maternity safety champions – NHS England: Maternity safety champions work at every level – trust, regional and national – and across regional, organisational and service boundaries . They develop strong partnerships, can promote the professional cultures needed to deliver better care, and play a central role in ensuring that mothers and babies continue to receive the safest care possible by adopting best practice. This webpage includes a number of resources to assist maternity safety champions and services in delivering best practice.
  • Situation Awareness for Everyone (S.A.F.E) toolkit – RCPCH: This toolkit supports child health professionals to use quality improvement techniques at their sites. It can help improve communication and build a safety-based culture. And, it can deliver better outcomes for children and young people.

Leadership & Organisational Development

  • Our Leadership Way – NHS Leadership Academy: Our Leadership Way sets out the compassionate and inclusive behaviours we want all our leaders at every level to show towards us as individuals and our colleagues.
  • Professionalism and Cultural Transformation (PACT) Toolkit – NHS Employers: A toolkit to support managers to improve professional attitudes and behaviours in the workplace
  • Improving NHS culture – The King’s Fund: It is now accepted that healthy cultures in NHS organisations are crucial to ensuring the delivery of high-quality patient care. The King’s Fund developed a tool to help organisations assess their culture, identifying the ways in which it is working well, as well as the areas that need to change.
  • NHS health and wellbeing framework – NHS England: This framework is a high-level culture change toolkit aimed at health and wellbeing staff, human resources (HR) and organisational development (OD) staff, HR and OD directors, wellbeing guardians, managers, leaders and anyone with an interest in health and wellbeing.
  • Freedom to Speak Up – NHS England: NHS England aims to ensure everyone working within the NHS feels safe and confident to speak up. We encourage our NHS leaders to take the opportunity to learn and improve from those who speak up.

Staff wellbeing & emotional support

  • Caring for you – RCM: The RCM Caring for You campaign aims to place the onus into the hands of the employers and hold them accountable for the health, safety wellbeing and culture in the workplace
  • Improving Joy in Work – IHI: With burnout and staff turnover in health care continuing to rise at alarming rates, this white paper describes four steps leaders can take to improve joy in work and workforce well-being; a framework with nine critical components for ensuring a joyful, engaged workforce; key change ideas; and measurement and assessment tools.
  • Kindness in Healthcare: This website is the home for our ‘conversation for kindness’, which is a monthly meeting that was set up in the summer of 2020 by a group of colleagues and friends working in healthcare across Sweden, the UK and the USA.
  • Schwartz Rounds – The Point of Care Foundation: Schwartz Rounds provide a structured forum where all staff, clinical and non-clinical, come together regularly to discuss the emotional and social aspects of working in healthcare. The purpose of Rounds is to explore the challenges and rewards that are intrinsic to providing care, not to solve problems or to focus on the clinical aspects of patient care.

Maternity & perinatal care

  • Advice, Inform, Do (AID) – RCOG: AID is as a clear and simple communication tool which initiates escalation conversations using 3 simple phrases: “I am asking you for Advice”, “I am Informing you” and “I need you to Do…” It is designed to precede the commonly used SBAR (situation, background, response) which is a tool used to describe the clinical situation.
  • Building Successful Perinatal Optimisation Teams – BAPM: A Toolkit to support delivery of the Perinatal Optimisation Pathway
  • Civility and Respect – NHS England: To deliver on the NHS People Plan’s commitment to support NHS organisations in creating a positive workplace culture, the civility and respect programme has developed a practical, flexible and interactive toolkit and additional resources.
  • Each Baby Counts + Learn & Support (EBC L&S) – RCOG: The aim of Each Baby Counts + Learn & Support (EBC L&S) is to improve maternity care by focusing on the working practices of the multidisciplinary maternity team.
  • Team of the shift – RCOG: The team of the shift intervention was designed to standardise a huddle at the start of every shift, prior to clinical handover in order to promote excellence in teamwork.