Evergreen Inpatient Unit, Luton and Bedfordshire CAMHS – Working Together to Understand the Problem and Develop Change Ideas

By Sean Dumbell (Modern Matron) 

We are a new ward and therefore the process of arriving at our change ideas was a little different to elsewhere. Unlike other areas, we didn’t really have much data that could give us insight into the culture around observations within our team. We put out a staff survey that sought to gather information about staff attitudes to observations and engagement and from this we were able to generate some change ideas. 

Firstly, staff often found it difficult to record the accurate time on the observation sheet due to not being allowed phones on the ward. A change idea generated from this feedback was to attach a fob watch to the observation record folder, we have had positive feedback about this.  

Staff also fed back that observations are often missed due to being pulled into other things in the ward environment. To combat this, the member of staff on observations now wears a bright pink high visibility jacket with “observation nurse!” on the back.  In practice, this change idea has been great, it provides a greater focus for the member of staff on observations and prompts the rest of the team to keep them free from distractions and other tasks.