The Covid-19 pandemic exposed and exacerbated the stresses that frontline healthcare workers encounter on the job. One of those stresses can feeling psychologically unsafe in our work teams. To strengthen and sustain team psychological safety we designed and implemented a daily on-shift teamwork process called “Circle Up” in several hospitals and health systems.
Circle up:
• Creates regular times and places for team problem-solving and connection, promotes better communication and improves the psychological well-being of care teams. Through strategic adaptation of existing huddles and end-of-day debriefings Circle Up systematically allows teams to unite, “warm up” and “cool down.”
• Improves on-shift work processes, resilience, and peer connection. It also supports colleagues to “doff” their work identity and concerns at the end of the day such that home life is more refreshing and separate. Participants report greater interprofessional peer connectedness and less psychological distress. They feel encouraged to speak up more throughout the day and with colleagues they would not normally approach.
• Offers a proactive, rather than reactive, process of on-shift learning, process improvement, and peer support. Because of the silos created by most healthcare training, our healthcare teams are made up of profession-based subteams with their own “microclimates.” Circle up provides ways to connect these subteams and dissolve professional faultlines.
