Welcome - Clear Mutual expectations

Have a question about Clear Mutual Expectations? Had some experience with using it that you could share and that might help others? Found a particularly effective way of adapting it to your hospital? Please post it here in this section of the forum.

Hi there.

Having a mutal agreement between staff and patients work really well. Has been used in a previous Trust that I worked in. Found that both staff and service users identified the same rules/ needs/ concerns. etc. Also gives a sense of equal ownership towards the ward. Encourages both staff and services users to work alongside together, with regular meetings . This could be done via the Community meetings held on the ward, or maybe create a safeward meeting for staff and services users to attend together, to utilise views and input. Ward could identfy how often this should be held, either weekly, fortnightly, monthly. This would create a consus of mutual respect, with the goal of reducing the divide of them and us, with the intention of reducing conflict, frustrations, etc.

Hi Karen,

In our pilot study at Homerton Hospital the wards really took to this intervention and adopted it enthusiastically. However during the full trial many of the wards struggled to get this organised. We're not too sure why they had such a hard time doing it. They got there eventually in most cases but it took them some time.

Of course in the longer term the CME needs to be redefined with new groups of inpatients and changes of staff in order to keep it fresh. And this would require more meetings with patients. We hadn't thought of making the CME a regular part of community meetings though. How did you envisage this working?

Good luck with implementing Safewards!

Len