INTRODUCTION:
A huddle can be defined as a structured, brief (5-15 minutes), routine (daily or multiple times a day), face-to-face communication of a team’s membership.1 Daily healthcare huddles have been consistently shown to improve patient safety by enhancing teamwork, creating standardised communication processes, and providing a feeling of shared responsibility.2-6 A recent systematic review on the impact of multidisciplinary team huddles on patient safety published in the BMJ concluded that “the present body of research related to such huddles demonstrates a generally positive impact on safety”.7 Despite the evidence on the impact of huddles on patient outcomes and patient satisfaction,8-11 there is a dearth of literature on the impact of huddles on individual healthcare staff, particularly in relation to job satisfaction and work engagement.
The WHO Global Code of Practice on the International Recruitment of Health Personnel states that each country must ‘educate, retain, and sustain’ an appropriate health workforce.12 However, in the context of increased pressures on services, organisations can struggle to attract and retain skilled staff. One of the primary reasons for this type of ‘brain drain’ is the lack of job satisfaction within the health care system, which has been attributed to poor working cultures in organisations and the strong hierarchical nature of healthcare systems.13 Research has indicated that the feeling of not having a voice or influencing decisions decreases engagement, motivation, and wellbeing among medical staff14 and such environments can result in greater reported intention to leave. A strong body of evidence has demonstrated that turnover intention is a reliable indicator of job dissatisfaction.15,16
Job satisfaction among healthcare professionals is also important because if their own needs are not met, they often have difficulties in meeting the needs of their patients.17,18 Job satisfaction in healthcare workers has been reported to be related to a number of factors: having autonomy in decision-making, effective communication among staff and supervisors, and having the ability to express one’s opinion freely,19 all of which are potentially facilitated by the implementation of a daily team huddle.20 Huddle implementation in a healthcare team has been perceived by staff to increase accountability, create a culture of collaboration, foster a heightened sense of community, and increase empowerment, by giving all team members a dedicated time and platform to discuss concerns.20
Improved communication between team members has been shown to be a specific intervention that improves interdisciplinary teamwork.21 Programs such as TeamSTEPPS (Team Strategies and Tools to Enhance Performance and Patient Safety), the Aston Team Facilitation Programme, and ISBAR (identify, situation, background, assessment, recommendation) are widely used in multiple healthcare systems to improve team communication.22Thus, it is hypothesised that the implementation of a huddle would therefore promote teamwork by improving communication between team members.
We conducted a systematic review on the impact of daily, multi-disciplinary huddles on healthcare staff. The primary outcomes of interest were staff satisfaction, teamwork, and work engagement in a healthcare setting. We are not aware of any other reviews conducted on these potential outcomes of the huddle in a healthcare setting.