Learning from excellence in critical care

Adrian Plunkett describes how to learn from excellence in critical care. Learning from excellence is an initiative which began at Birmingham Children’s Hospital.  Firstly, Adrian shares an anecdote regarding how the initiative begun. He sent a letter to the CEO of a hospital appreciating one of the doctors who treated him for cancer. The doctor unfortunately never received it. This caused Adrian to ask - is appreciation and gratitude undervalued? Evidently, noticing excellence will lead to two things: learning new insights and increasing staff morale. Adrian raises the question, why we do we not focus on the good things? We spend all our time improving safety and quality even though accidents and disasters are only a small percentage of what we do.  Moreover, Adrian claims that people inherently have negative biases. This is evident in healthcare, so how can we combat this?  The solution is to focus on excellent care. This led to the formation of a reporting system called Learning from Excellence (LfE), where people answer two questions: Who did something excellent? What did they do? LfE is a formal system for reporting and providing positive feedback and appreciation to the healthcare workers. It is a beneficial and constructive way of learning from excellence.  Finally, Adrian explains, “Saying ‘thank you’ or ‘well done’ is the easiest quality improvement intervention of all.” For more like this head to our podcast page. #CodaPodcast