Patient Safety Training In Just One Minute

By Tracy Granzyk, MS

One of the challenges healthcare leaders face is reaching the frontlines of care and the C-suite with safety culture messaging and teachings. Healthcare communicators also have to be careful when using email as a first line tool. Today’s healthcare workforce is bombarded with content to read, data to analyze, sales pitches from vendors, health system updates, and mandatory training requests. As a result, it can be difficult for healthcare leaders to capture the attention of their intended audience.

At the same time, the need for educational content designed to improve safety culture continues to grow. With increasing movement toward adopting the practices of high reliability organizations and human factors in healthcare, including a just and learning culture as the foundation, new training materials will be required. Greater patient engagement along with the creation of meaningful patient-provider partnerships in the delivery of care is also becoming a higher priority in many healthcare organizations. The patient experience has become such a priority; entire departments have sprouted up to focus on improvements at the point of care. Add to that Lean, Six Sigma, and the roll out of manufacturing and quality-based initiatives new to many places, and you have healthcare professionals being asked to adopt and apply practices in their day-to-day work that their healthcare education has ill-prepared them to do. What is the answer?

One way for organizations to share new learning and related content is to create it themselves, however, that can be time consuming and costly. Another approach is to partner with a consulting organization that has pre-developed content for the desired program, and can help direct the internal communication plan to reinforce the program. A third approach is to purchase off-the-shelf content from a knowledgeable content developer with experience in the healthcare space to reinforce the learning.

SolidLine Media (www.solidlinemedia.com) is a video production company that has been working in the development of safety culture and related content since 2007. The team, which has an expansive healthcare portfolio, is behind MedStar Health’s Annie’s Story: How A System’s Approach Can Change Safety Culture (http://bit.ly/18VGME9) as well as the new release, Please See Me, a theatrical representation of an ideal patient-provider conversation.

Responding to the need for compact educational healthcare messaging, SolidLine has recently released Minute for Medicine (www.minuteformedicine.com), a library of 52, 1-minute videos designed to reinforce initiatives related to the formation of a safety culture via brief, entertaining messaging organizations can own, and even brand to their own health system. The series is separated into seven sections: infection prevention, high reliability, patient partnerships, leadership & culture, general safety, patient/provider experience, and “the intangibles.” Topics range from shared decision making to hand hygiene to a human factors approach to patient safety, and everything in between. Each video focuses on a single patient safety, high-quality healthcare delivery topic and can be utilized to remind healthcare professionals to think about important patient safety topics every week.

A patient safety-based content toolkit like the Minute for Medicine series, pre-developed by a team that engaged patient safety leaders in its development, addresses what most concerns patient safety leaders: never events and reimbursement challenges, HCHAPS and culture of safety scores. The SolidLine team also knows crafting an entire campaign to convey knowledge required for the culture change needed in healthcare today can be costly and time consuming. The Minute for Medicine tool presents an economic alternative to recreating the wheel at every healthcare organization.

Tracy Granzyk is a healthcare content creator, strategist, and consultant, and can be contacted at tracy@solidlinemedia.com.