Deliberate practices of speaking up and responding skills: the Speak-PREP e-learning module for healthcare professionals.

Purpose: Speaking up and responding to others' concerns promotes patient safety. We describe health professionals' utilisation of these important skills.

Method: We developed an interactive e-learning module, Speak-PREP, to train healthcare professionals in speaking up and responding strategies. Participants completed interactive video-based exercises that engaged them with entering speaking up and responding statements, augmenting strategies from a list of prompting phrases and responding to a pushback. We report strategy utilisation.

Results: A total of 101 health professionals completed Speak-PREP training. Most frequently used speaking up strategies were: to explore solutions (50%), of others (45%) and through invitations (43%). Responding strategies included expressed by colleagues, and (70%, 67% and 50%, respectively). When prompted, participants augmented their statements with concerns, to deepen understanding, to start questions and (p<0.00001, p=0.003, p=0.0002 and p<0.0001, respectively). Pushbacks lead to increased use of and decreasing and (p<0.05 for all).

Conclusions: The Speak-PREP module targeted deliberate practice in speaking up and responding skills. Future work should examine the application of these strategies in the clinical environment.