Using an Action Series framework to address communication challenges in clinical teams

On behalf of Dr. Adele Harrison and Julia Porter

Improving Healthcare Team Communication Through Action Series

Effective communication and teamwork between healthcare providers is an essential component of providing safe care for patients. While there are many tools to support communication among healthcare professionals, time constraints of a busy care environment limit capacity for healthcare team members to dedicate time to professional development and translating ‘best practice’ into daily work is often challenging.

Improvement science is an approach which engages clinical teams to make small incremental changes to improve care delivery; however, there can be barriers to implementing quality improvement (QI) programmes and teams often require ongoing support to carry out QI projects in their clinical environments.

We challenged the assumption that QI training is required for clinical care providers to lead a clinical care team through a QI project at the local level and developed a low-touch, time-efficient approach to address team effectiveness in on-call communication in the acute care setting using QI methodology. Our aim was to apply the same approach to address gaps in creating, communicating and clarifying medical goals for discharge within the healthcare team including patients and families.

An Action Series is a structured programme using a combination of learning sessions, toolkits and expert coaching to facilitate the implementation of changes and improvements within organisations. Examples include ‘Learning about Opioid Use Disorder in the emergency department’ by Health Quality BC and Healthcare Excellence Canada’s ‘Leading Safety Differently Action Series’.

Having described the development of an Action Series designed to improve on-call communication, titled the Good Call Action Series, we aimed to validate the early findings with different groups of healthcare professionals and apply the learnings to a different team communication challenge in the Well Planned Action Series.

Using these two examples of the use of an Action Series, we outline the framework to engage healthcare providers in developing and delivering a communication-based Action Series, including five learning modules followed by action periods designed to lead a team through effective change.