May 3, 2024
For the first time ever, London Health Sciences Centre (LHSC) has received a Healthcare Insurance Reciprocal of Canada (HIROC) Foundation Safety Grant Award.
The award is the result of a collaborative effort between the Critical Care Outreach Team (CCOT) and the Inpatient Medicine Unit at Victoria Hospital, and the funding will support the development of a new interdisciplinary training program and the adoption of new tools that will foster greater collaboration between the two teams.
The project proposal was led by Tara Caslick, Operations Manager in the Critical Care Trauma Centre (CCTC) at Victoria Hospital, and Lyndsey Reid-Jones, Operations Manager, Inpatient Medicine & Family Medicine Services at Victoria Hospital, and was supported by numerous leaders and departments, including the Office of Quality, Risk, and Patient Safety and Nursing Practice Excellence and Innovation (NPEI).
What is the role of the Critical Care Outreach Team?
The Critical Care Outreach Team is a critical care team comprised of a respiratory therapist, a critical care nurse, and a Critical Care physician. They provide critical care support to patients in other areas of the hospital. If a patient’s condition changes, the team on the floor can call CCOT for guidance and support.
Through early intervention by CCOT, patients can often be kept on the floor rather than requiring a move to the Critical Care Trauma Centre, where they will typically require more serious interventions. If a patient does require a transfer to the Critical Care Trauma Centre, the move would be facilitated by CCOT.
As the unit with the highest call volume to CCOT, it is important that those working on the Inpatient Medicine Unit are confident in their ability to detect the early signs of patient deterioration and know when to involve CCOT.
What will the HIROC Safety Grant support?
In collaboration with Canadian Surgical Technologies and Robotics (CSTAR), hands-on simulation training will be brought right into the clinical areas through Project BETTY[JD1] . The education sessions will focus on teaching all staff on the floor to recognize the early signs of patient deterioration. To empower charge nurses to become ‘super users’ of CCOT and provide the best possible support to their teams, specialized training will be delivered to charge nurses through simulation training sessions at CSTAR.
In addition to new education for staff, the project includes the creation of two new tools to help develop stronger collaboration between Inpatient Medicine and CCOT. A new debriefing tool will help provide an opportunity for all staff involved to discuss learnings and identify opportunities for continuous improvement. A new reporting tool that will be used by charge nurses to identify patients who may require early CCOT intervention is also under development.
“By partnering with CCOT, we’ll be able to better understand how our teams can best complement each other to improve performance and patient experience,” said Reid-Jones. “Knowing that you can intervene early and help a patient before things progress, that’s rewarding because as a nurse, you just want to help people.”
How will this impact patient care at LHSC?
By identifying the subtle cues of patient deterioration and engaging CCOT early, the care team increases the likelihood of keeping the patient on the same floor rather than requiring a move to critical care.
“It is exciting to be able to come and work with Inpatient Medicine and build this relationship,” said Caslick. “We’re looking forward to having this partnership and being able to identify those subtle cues with patients so we can get called sooner and provide interventions to the patients on the floors. It will ultimately be better for patient safety and patient experience.”
The HIROC Safety Grant Awards are a yearly initiative where the HIROC Foundation provides funding support for subscribers’ innovative safety solutions.
Pictured left-right: Tara Caslick, Operations Manager, Critical Care Truama Centre, VH and Lyndsey Reid-Jones, Operations Manager, Inpatient Medicine and Family Medicine Services, VH.