In this blog, Noshin Menzies, Senior Project Manager, discusses all things Patient Safety Culture Club – a new community for everyone in the West of England region with an interest in Safety Culture to share ideas, learning and to collaborate.
Culture Club has launched at the West of England AHSN! No, you haven’t been sent hurtling backwards into the 80s, nor have we secured Boy George himself to facilitate online workshops for us. If you were hoping you could finally realise that dream to be a New Romantic, this isn’t the place to do that, but it is the place to meet and learn alongside your colleagues working in patient safety and be curious about Safety Culture.
We have established the West of England Patient Safety Culture Club to bring together all of those working in this space in the region. We want to come together, share experiences and dive deeper into topics such as ‘Just Culture’, ‘Psychological Safety’ and ‘Unconscious Bias’.
We are aiming to meet regularly, and in true living our values style, are employing a quality improvement approach to test out the best way to run sessions. We want our members to lead us on what topics are included and whether an open discussion session, versus more of a teaching approach is needed as new areas are explored. Culture Club is open to all working in the West of England who are working in or have a developing interest in all aspects of Safety Culture.
Most importantly we want to foster a sense of community, something that is of scant supply at the moment, given the persistent restrictions on face-to-face meetings and the extraordinary pressures our clinical colleagues are under. We have a range of great techniques and ways to make screen participation interesting and engaging which we have learnt from launching several programmes and learning communities during the pandemic. Our ambition is to get to know each other and learn from the excellent work that is happening across the region.
To date, Culture Club sessions have focused on Psychological Safety, hosted by Katie Donovan Adekanmbi (BCohCO) and Aisha Thomas (Representation Matters). They were a deep dive into psychological safety and creating safe spaces and also featured a group cuppa with mailed out teabags sent to participants prior to the meetings!
Unfortunately, we had to reschedule the latest meetings in December and January, due to the extraordinary pressures on the health system and the impact it has on our clinical colleagues. However, we have two exciting sessions planned hosted by our neighbour and friend Jo Pendray, focusing on “Psychological Safety through the lens of Unconscious Bias”. We are waiting for January to respectfully push off and hopefully take with it some of the pressures and give healthcare professionals a bit more time and space to take part in learning and development.
We really hope ‘you come and go’ to our next gathering of Culture Club, although we cannot promise there won’t be more excellent puns such as this. ‘Do you really want to hurt (me) us’ and miss out on a great opportunity to share and learn from experts and colleagues? Ok I promise that’s the last one!
The next Culture Club meeting is on Thursday 3 March 2022.
Find out more about the meeting and book here.
Posted on January 25, 2022 by Noshin Menzies, Senior Project Manager, West of England AHSN
