Globally, healthcare has faced many challenges implementing best practice standards for patient outcomes, including the surgical arena. How can we, as leaders and providers, help ensure best practice standards are being followed throughout the patient’s surgical journey? Good communication is key.
One successful step that can focus on the best patient outcomes is overcoming communication failures. The implementation of an interdisciplinary huddle into the daily structure in the surgical arena can prove to enhance communication breakdowns and address new best practice standards into this specialized healthcare setting. In a high reliability organization (HRO), a tool consistently used to keep staff informed of daily operations and issues is an interdisciplinary huddle. These huddles are meant to be a brief overview where the team looks at what happened in the last 24 hours (look back), what they might anticipate in the coming 24 hours (look ahead) and follow up or assign any issues that needed to be resolved urgently (start the clock).
