Northern Health’s Daily Safety Brief is a daily huddle whereby all areas of the organisation come together to highlight any issues affecting patient and staff safety that might have happened in the previous 24 hours, and whether anything is predicted to happen over the next 24 hours.

Jane Poxon, Chief Operating Officer, leads the huddle and says, “the idea of the briefing is to take the pulse of the organisation and know where our hot spots are”.

A senior medic is also the ‘Safety Officer of the Day’. Their roles are to ensure that all areas reporting as Red/Amber have sufficient plans and support in place to ensure patient and staff safety on a daily basis.

Inpatient areas and departments (clinical and non-clinical), represented by at least one person from their area, report out for 60 seconds each to highlight their areas’ overall safety status. If the area is in Red or Amber, they are asked to identify the issues that are affecting them and how the organisation can support them (if needed).

The Daily Safety Brief came about through a High Reliability Organisation (HRO) project, whereby a working group (consisting of nurse unit managers, medics, allied health etc.) came together to review the ‘Reliable Patient Management System Tier Meetings’ that were in place, and to understand whether there was an opportunity to improve these.

The Daily Safety Brief happens everyday at 9.45 am and is a standing meeting with Broadmeadows Hospital and Bundoora Centre phoning in via conference call.

Any further questions or feedback can be directed to the project manager for this HRO project, Ed Savill: Edward.Savill@nh.org.au.