Obstetric Anaesthesia Annual Scientific Meeting 2024

Introduction of a safety huddle on delivery suite at St George's Hospital

J. Sandhu, M. Robson & K. Kendrick, St George’s Hospital

Introduction

The tertiary delivery suite at St George’s hospital has approximately 4500 births every year. The workload and acuity necessitate an effective multidisciplinary handover addressing clinical factors, operational issues and human factors. The ‘Each Baby Counts’ report in 2018 highlighted human factors as paramount in contributing to adverse maternal and fetal outcomes. Local standards exist for handover but they do not include operational issues which may affect safety. Following a multidisciplinary morbidity and mortality meeting in which a near miss was attributed to human factors, a project was approved to improve discussion of non-clinical factors on delivery suite. During this meeting, a safety huddle was proposed:

•Safety huddles have traditionally been used outside of healthcare in high-risk industries such as aviation to identify potential threats and act pre-emptively to mitigate these

•Checklists are often utilised in order to reduce human error

•Within the hospital environment, they have been used in high acuity environments such as intensive care

•They have been shown to improve situational awareness, communication and teamwork but also to aid in planning and coordinating workload 1

•Safety huddles have been introduced successfully in maternity units in the UK and have facilitated staff in discussing and escalating operational issues. This has focused the team on unified goals for the shift and allowed potential risks to be addressed 2

Obstetric Anaesthesia Annual Scientific Meeting 2024

Introduction of a safety huddle on delivery suite at St George's Hospital.

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