Huddles may be the best way for healthcare workers to communicate during COVID-19

Editor's Note

Brief huddles, rather than a barrage of emails and texts about safety and risk may be the fastest and simplest way for healthcare workers to avoid communication overload from COVID-19, this study from Baylor University reports.

Interviews of 40 workers in two hospitals found the following:

• Healthcare workers questioned the effectiveness of email. Nurses said they could not access email on the floors, so safety and risk information piled up in their inboxes, giving them feelings of communication overload. Physicians said the emails they received on safety and risk were not useful or they were irrelevant to their work. Physicians also said they did not check their emails at work because it competed with time spent with patients. 
• Nurses were positive about face-to-face team safety huddles for risk information or care huddles about patients, saying they were faster, more up to date, and allowed for rapid feedback. Patient care huddles were commonly held by the nurses and physicians at the beginning and end of shifts and lasted about 5 minutes. 
• Managers liked emails for giving timely summaries about safety and risks. But they experienced an overload of a different kind. They were expected to check their emails when they were off, which means they were never off.

The healthcare providers offered suggestions to improve communication, including limiting risk and safety emails from management to three bullet points and then discussing and reinforcing the messages in brief morning huddles.

Huddles make frontline workers stop, listen, and pay full attention, the researchers say.