Penn Medicine Lancaster General Health continues to advance the culture of high reliability we started in 2016 through a renewed focus on quality and safety. Pursuing high reliability is important, simply put, because our patients and their families entrust us with their safety. They expect and deserve excellent care, and our LG Health team deserves the best work environment.
The health care environment is incredibly complex and unpredictable. In order to ensure the safety of our patients and staff in the high-risk situations you face every day, we must have an effective way to recognize possible safety risks and act quickly to prevent them.
Our huddle system is a critical piece of our efforts to achieve high reliability. Through our huddles, we engage individuals and teams across LG Health in identifying and solving the problems you encounter in your daily work. We recently began an effort to enhance and reinvigorate our huddles.
Our leadership team first observed huddles throughout LG Health to better understand how we can use the huddles to help you do your work more safely every day. We saw that many of our huddles had evolved to primarily focus on operational and team updates. While communication is certainly important, in order to achieve high reliability, we must refocus our huddles on promptly identifying and addressing any issues related to quality and safety.
Our updated and enhanced huddle agenda will serve to accelerate our continuous improvement efforts. Simply put, if we know about a safety issue today, we can fix it today. Our huddles review the previous day’s work to identify any safety incidents or near-misses, as well as their root causes. We then discuss the corrective actions we need to implement to prevent a recurrence of the safety issue. At the next day’s huddle, we review whether our actions were successful in ensuring patient safety.
While our huddles’ primary focus is to clearly identify what we need to do each and every day to provide safe care, they also include time for team updates, to recognize great safety catches and discuss key initiatives connected to our mission. By delivering safe, high-quality care on a consistent and reliable basis, we will advance the health and well-being of the communities we serve.
Through our renewed efforts around effective huddles, we will strengthen our culture of high reliability and ultimately create an environment where patients are safe and employees want to work.