About — Click/Watch/Pass It On

Do you want to communicate better with your colleagues and staff? Do you want to improve the care of patients? How about improving your efficiency in your clinical setting? Enhancing provider and staff satisfaction? Harnassing the power of your team to provide population management? Do you want to create a culture in which team members are empowered to speak up about patient safety issues and propose ideas for quality improvement initiatives? And what about providing a vehicle to learn and practice interprofessionally? Huddles do all of this and more. They are, in fact, the hub of interprofessional, team- based care.

The video How to Huddle will not only inspire you to do all of the above, it will demonstrate how to mobilize the power of huddles to create or enhance patient-centered, team-based care.  We hope that you will click on the above link, watch it, and then pass it on to your network of colleagues and even friends.  I.E. Click, Watch, and Pass It On.
Today, there’s a lot of talk about teamwork and interprofessional education and practice. Much of the education and training in these areas occurs outside of clinical settings. This can lead to a gap between education and practice. The huddle is a way to bring learning about teamwork into the actual healthcare workplace. It’s a vehicle to teach, practice, reinforce, and reflect upon teamwork and interprofessional practice.

If you’re here to learn what huddles are and why they are important, you can just watch the video. If you’re hear to learn how to huddle, you can download some resources that will help you implement and coach huddles or improve your current team processes.

What exactly are Huddles?

Huddles are “structured brief (5-15 minutes) routine (i.e. daily or multiple times a day) face-to-face communication of a team’s full members” (Rodriguez et al. 2014). Content covered during huddles typically includes a) pre-visit planning for scheduled patients, b) strategizing care plans for patients with special or complex needs, c) addressing workflow and communication issues through collective problem solving, and d) insuring awareness of what team members do and what actions are happening on the team and in practice.

Resources

Here are some Huddle Resources that will help you get started or advance on the Huddle journey:

Thanks

To the many people who helped make this happen including:

U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Office of Academic Affiliations and VA’s Employee Education System.

Donors

National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW)
Nancy Fish
Chris Finn
Gordon Schiff and Mardge Cohen
Julia Hallisy
Jean Entine
Maureen Bisognano
Ross Koppel
David L. Feldman
Helen Haskell
Patricia Skolnik
Sal Roselli
Kim Gluck
Steve Kittle
Point Realty
Mike Mendenhall
Michael Gardam
Josette Rivera
Excelsior College Press
Isabel Zaror
Fran Benson
Earl Dotter and Deborah
Julie Horvath
Karen Sundheim
Beth Boynton
Emily Cole
Allie Light
Fran Benson
Margaret Jordan and Mike Parker
Gail Eierweiss and Jeff Kilbreth
Ann Mendenhall
Kathleen Burke and Lou Kern
Gail Bateson
Hans and Leni Von Blankensee

Lisa Von Blankensee
Kathleen Wimer and Joe Puleo
Shelley Starr
Bill Garlock
Lance Bailey
Jerry Hall
Daniel Angotti
Megan Mendenhall
Sam Field
Leanne Locke
Maureen Bisognano
Joe Keffer
Garrett Brown
Barbara Graham
Ruth Johnson
Kenneth Scott
Margaret Wotkyns
Phyllis Willett
Sally Tobin
Barbara Graham
Kenneth Scott
Dana Beth Weinberg
Terry Leape
Florian Schwander
Marjorie Funk
M Myerson
Robert Gumpert
Tommie May
Gail Leondar Wright
Gordon Young
Nina Shapiro
Susan Oehser