Team situational awareness: practitioner-centred design of a safety huddles toolkit

Patients die every year as a result of a failure to recognize early warnings of deterioration. A contributing factor is poor team communication and situational awareness. This paper describes the practitioner-centred design of a safety huddles toolkit. Interviews, observations and collective discussions conducted synchronously (face-face) and asynchronously (virtually) informed decisions to iteratively design the toolkit. As a result, the toolkit is designed to be continuously adapted to allow practitioner-led improvement for different clinical specialties. Indicative findings suggest practitioners find it to be a useful toolkit to adopt safety huddles and to improve team communication and patient awareness. The tool is being spread further six months following project completion and is enclosed.