Fidelity and the impact of patient safety huddles on teamwork and safety culture: an evaluation of the Huddle Up for Safer Healthcare (HUSH) project.

Background: The Patient Safety Huddle (PSH) is a brief multidisciplinary daily meeting held to discuss threats to patient safety and actions to mitigate risk. Despite growing interest and application of huddles as a mechanism for improving safety, evidence of their impact remains limited. There is also variation in how huddles are conceived and implemented with insufficient focus on their fidelity (the extent to which delivered as planned) and potential ways in which they might influence outcomes.

Sustaining the commitment to patient safety huddles: insights from eight acute hospital ward teams.

Background: A recent initiative in hospital settings is the patient safety huddle (PSH): a brief multidisciplinary meeting held to highlight patient safety issues and actions to mitigate identified risks.

Aim: The authors studied eight ward teams that had sustained PSHs for over 2 years in order to identify key contributory factors.

Methods: Unannounced observations of the PSH on eight acute wards in one UK hospital were undertaken.

Barriers and enablers to the implementation of a complex quality improvement intervention for acute kidney injury: A qualitative evaluation of stakeholder perceptions of the Tackling AKI study.

Background: Acute kidney injury in hospital patients is common and associated with reduced survival and higher healthcare costs. The Tackling Acute Kidney Injury (TAKI) quality improvement project aimed to reduce mortality rates in patients with acute kidney injury by implementing a multicomponent intervention comprising of an electronic alert, care bundle and education in five UK hospitals across a variety of wards. A parallel developmental evaluation using a case study approach was conducted to provide the implementation teams with insights into factors that might impact intervention implementation and fidelity.

An Organizational-Level Program of Intervention for AKI: A Pragmatic Stepped Wedge Cluster Randomized Trial.

Background: Variable standards of care may contribute to poor outcomes associated with AKI. We evaluated whether a multifaceted intervention (AKI e-alerts, an AKI care bundle, and an education program) would improve delivery of care and patient outcomes at an organizational level.

Methods: A multicenter, pragmatic, stepped-wedge cluster randomized trial was performed in five UK hospitals, involving patients with AKI aged ≥18 years.

What do we know about brief interventions for physical activity that could be delivered in primary care consultations? A systematic review of reviews.

This systematic review of reviews aims to investigate how brief interventions (BIs) are defined, whether they increase physical activity, which factors influence their effectiveness, who they are effective for, and whether they are feasible and acceptable. We searched CINAHL, Cochrane database of systematic reviews, DARE, HTA database, EMBASE, MEDLINE, PsycINFO, Science Citation Index-Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index, and Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network from their inception until May 2015 to identify systematic reviews of the effectiveness of BIs aimed at promoting physical activity in adults, reporting a physical activity outcome and at least one BI that could be delivered in a primary care setting. A narrative synthesis was conducted.

Design and Rationale of 'Tackling Acute Kidney Injury', a Multicentre Quality Improvement Study.

Acute kidney injury (AKI) is common and associated with extremely poor outcomes. While strategies to tackle deficiencies in basic care delivery are advocated, robust testing of their effectiveness is also needed. The Tackling AKI study was designed to test whether a complex intervention (consisting of an e-alert, care bundle and education programme) can be successfully implemented across a range of UK hospitals, and whether this will deliver improved patient outcomes.

Implementation of a nurse-led behaviour change intervention to support medication taking in type 2 diabetes: beyond hypothesised active ingredients (SAMS Consultation Study).

Background: Implementation of trial interventions is rarely assessed, despite its effects on findings. We assessed the implementation of a nurse-led intervention to facilitate medication adherence in type 2 diabetes (SAMS) in a trial against standard care in general practice. The intervention increased adherence, but not through the hypothesised psychological mechanism.

Is attention necessary for object identification? Evidence from eye movements during the inspection of real-world scenes.

Eye movements were recorded during the display of two images of a real-world scene that were inspected to determine whether they were the same or not (a comparative visual search task). In the displays where the pictures were different, one object had been changed, and this object was sometimes taken from another scene and was incongruent with the gist. The experiment established that incongruous objects attract eye fixations earlier than the congruous counterparts, but that this effect is not apparent until the picture has been displayed for several seconds.