Individuals working in healthcare are keenly aware of the ethical and legal obligations they have to patient safety and quality of care. To achieve the highest level of care, it is equally important that healthcare professionals support and protect each other. Stepping in to prevent harm improves the quality of patient care, protects the careers of peer healthcare workers and the reputation of their agencies. Similarly, when someone sees a fellow healthcare worker showing the strain of this stressful work, skillful intervention can prevent severe emotional and physical harm, up to and including suicide.
Healthcare workers, who selflessly rise to serve when there is a call for care in their community, are more essential to society than ever before. Heroes knows from experience that the provision of healthcare requires courage and loyalty; characteristics that are both a strength and increase the risk for burnout, often resulting in mistakes that can negatively impact the patients they serve.
Healthcare workers across all disciplines experience serious, acute, and chronic stressors. These stressors affect their performance and their personal wellness. Stressors, whether acute, chronic, or both, cause a variety of bad outcomes, including mistakes, policy transgression, unhealthy coping behaviors, and suicide. Heroes’ expertise and experience with healthcare cultures uniquely situate our program to build on existing wellness resources and elevate the proactive approach needed for healthcare worker wellness through the power of active bystandership.
In surgical suites across the country, active bystandership has become more common. For example, nurses and surgical techs are often empowered to call a “time out” when they believe a serious mistake is about to be made. This practice has prevented countless serious errors and lawsuits. However, limiting active bystandership to operating rooms is a tragic mistake, as it would be equally important to prevent all other forms of error and misconduct that can ruin the reputation and finances of an entire healthcare organization. Healthcare agencies without active bystandership are at increased risk for diminished quality of care, lack of community trust, costly lawsuits, and damage to the most valuable resource, staff.
Today, healthcare organizations are facing constant threats to safety and quality of care. These threats include workplace injury, assault, exposure to infectious diseases, non-traditional work hours, and unreasonably high workloads. Most tragic mistakes in healthcare were observed by bystanders, including fellow healthcare professionals. Had they all been trained to intervene, and equally important, how to accept intervention, it is likely that tragedy would never have occurred.
Heroes acknowledges the important role that healthcare agencies play in their communities. Emergency departments, psychiatric facilities, behavioral health care and outpatient clinics, and home and community-based services, provide care that is necessary for the health and safety of every community. Disruption in the healthcare workforce is a direct threat to community health needs. Heroes aims to support healthcare facility goals for employee wellness by way of peer intervention training.
Active bystandership is a skill that can be learned and plays a key role in reducing burnout and mistakes, thereby preventing harm to patients and increasing staff health and well-being. Heroes Active Bystandership Training has the knowledge and experience to implement a program to teach each and every one of your staff to become an active bystander with the ability and expectation to intervene before harm is done. Because we understand the skills and values that your staff bring to work every day, we are able to help them utilize those qualities to prevent harm.
