Connection and involvement towards violence reduction in City & Hackney

Find out how collaborative work helped City & Hackney achieve an outstanding 57% reduction in violence across all adult mental health wards. Words by Kelly Gale, Improvement Advisor.

Kelly Gale, Improvement Advisor

City & Hackney Adult Mental Health Service began a project on Violence Reduction in the summer of 2016. Violence was an issue in varying degrees across all six wards in the unit, so an improvement collaborative was formed to work on reducing violence together.

Each ward started testing change ideas such as safety huddles and safety crosses and recording the data. The wards would also regularly meet to compare their findings and results. This collaborative working enabled the ward managers and staff teams to learn from each other on what is working well in each area and work out ways in which the improvements made could be increased.  It also created some healthy competition between the ward teams, which made them strive for improvements.

Through this joint working, the ward’s safety huddles also became unit-wide huddles. This gave the ward managers a way of knowing exactly what is going on in the other wards and gave them ways of helping out their colleagues if they were in difficulty that day – a true collaborative working.

Results were presented to staff, carers and service users at the end of 2017.

The wards achieved the phenomenal results of reducing violence and aggression across the wards by 57%. This level has been maintained and the project is now going into quality control. This means that it has ceased to be a standalone project and the changes have now been adapted into the normal working style of the wards.

To ensure that these levels are maintained going forward, the violence and aggression data is still being collected daily as part of their usual routine and the ward managers meet regularly with the Borough Lead Nurse/Associate Clinical Director to review the results, which are also then being reported to the Directorate Management Team (DMT).  It is only through a joint, all levels approach that we can ensure the levels of reduced violence are continually on everyone’s radar and that there are systems for it to be maintained long term.

If you want to know more about the City & Hackney Violence Reduction collaborative please access The City & Hackney Violence Reduction Collaborative page.