Celebrating a 28% reduction in physical violence in Newham

Emma Binley – Improvement Advisor

Newham celebrated a 28% reduction in physical violence incidents as a result of the violence reduction collaborative. The service is now moving to Quality Control. Read more about their journey in this blog by Improvement Advisor Emma Binley.

Newham’s violence reduction collaborative began in June 2016, when all the wards came together to discuss the change bundle that had been tested in Tower Hamlets. Each ward selected the combination of change ideas they initially wanted to focus on:

• Safety Discussion in Community Meetings
• Safety Huddles
• Broset Violence Checklist

Each ward measured the number of incidents of physical violence (red dot) and non-physical violence (orange dot) using the safety cross, which different to the other directorates was displayed in the ward office. Between June 2016 -April 2018 the teams came together for collaborative learning sets every six weeks.

Over the two years of continuous hard work and dedication, Newham achieved some incredible results; a 28% reduction in physical violent incidents across the whole unit with even greater reductions on individual wards.

As the work began to focus on developing quality control systems, Newham decided to run a celebration event to mark the completion of the violence reduction work in its current form and  to thank the staff and service users for all their hard work and commitment over the past two years. In April 2018, staff and service users came together and shared their experience of being part of this learning system and each ward told their story in their own unique way including, a role-play from Topaz ward, poem from Ivory ward and a Rap from Ruby Triage ward.

Each of the wards were asked to share their experience of being part of the violence reduction collaborative and describe the impact of the work on their wards, below is a summary of  some of the comments that were shared. Click on the images to zoom in:

At the end of the event the group were asked if they had any advice for anyone else thinking of working on reducing violence and here is an example from one of the groups:

Similarly to Tower Hamlets and City and Hackney, Newham are now working on refining their quality control board and quality control systems. Their unit-wide safety huddle takes place on a daily basis around their quality control board and they have also developed an audit template, which they share and discuss on a monthly basis at the Senior Nurse’s meeting, with the aim to ensure that the change bundle continues to be used reliably. The collaborative learning sets have now transitioned into Time to Think meetings which also focuses on reducing restrictive practices.