The Effectiveness of Multidisciplinary Team Huddles in Healthcare Hospital-Based Setting

Abstract

Objective

Huddles are short, regular debriefings that are designed to provide frontline staff and bedside caregivers environments to share problems and identify solutions. Daily huddle implementation could improve medical safety work, problem identification and improvement, situation awareness and teamwork enhancement, the collaboration and communication between professionals and departments, and patient safety. This study aimed evaluated the effectiveness of a hospital-based huddle at a general medical ward in Taiwan.

Methods

A Continuous Integration team was conducted by combining multidisciplinary frontline staff to huddle at a 74-bed general medical ward. Team Huddles started twice a week. A physical huddle run board was created, which contained four parts, including idea submitted, idea approved, working on an idea and standardizing. Problems were submitted to the board to be identified, and the solutions were evaluated through huddle discussion. We divided the problems into two groups: quick hits (resolved within 24–48hrs) and complex issues (resolved >48hrs). An anonymous questionnaire was designed to evaluate the huddle response.

Results

A total of 44 huddles occurred from September 9th, 2020, to September 30th, 2021, and 81 issues were identified and resolved. The majority issues were policy documentation (n=23; 28.4%). Sixty-seven (82.7%) issues were defined as quick hits, and the other fourteen (17.3%) issues were complex. The mean hours to the resolution of quick hits was 5.17 hours, median 3.5 hours, and range from 0.01–15.4 hours. The mean days to resolve completion issues were 19.73 days, median 7.5 days, and range 3.57–26.14 days. An overwhelming 92.9% of staff responded that huddles help to expedite the process to reach treatment goals, reduce clinical mistakes, near misses, reduce patient incidences, and help teamwork enhancement, with rating of 4.52 (on a 5-point Likert scale).

Conclusion

Implementing of multidisciplinary team huddle improved the accountability of issue identification, problem-solving and teamwork enhancement.

Keywords:

• huddle run
• safety culture
• teamwork
• patient safety

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank for team members participating in this study in Taichung Veterans General hospital.

Disclosure

The authors report no conflicts of interest in this work.