It Takes a Village: Improving Hospital Partnerships for Patients Requiring Injury Prevention Resources

Lindsay Pollok, MPH

Hospital-based injury prevention programs are an important resource for staff, families, and patients in pediatric trauma centers. Communication, training, and development of internal partnerships between injury prevention and clinical staff is key to meeting the needs of children with complex medical needs across the spectrum of service lines in a Level 1 Trauma Center and throughout a regional hospital network. In a hospital environment, injury prevention programs often have limited staff, resources, and funds, requiring innovative partnerships to best serve patients. The Covid-19 pandemic combined with staff turnover presented additional challenges to serving patient families. With many competing medical priorities for clinical staff, a patient’s child passenger safety needs may not be considered by clinical staff until discharge, which can be potentially stressful for staff and patient families.

Improving communication, information sharing, and internal relationships between the injury prevention program and clinical units including orthopedics, physical therapy, rehab, social work, emergency department, and the NICU has resulted in improved partnerships to thoroughly address patients’ injury prevention needs in a timely manner. Increasing the avenues for communication to include secure texting, paging, email, phone, intranet webpage and a physical safety center in the hospital provides multiple options for clinical staff to proactively contact the injury prevention program during business hours and provide access to informational resources 24/7. Improvements to communication include regular pre-operative communication between orthopedics and injury prevention as well as creating a patient list in the electronic medical record to indicate which patients are currently being followed by injury prevention staff.

Improvements in the process for communication between injury prevention and orthopedic staff around scheduled orthopedic procedures that may require injury prevention expertise results in more adequate time for preparation for complex consults that may require time to work through and resolve. This leads to a smoother and more efficient consultation experience with patient families, minimizing discharge delays. Partnership between physical therapists and injury prevention allows the two programs to cluster care when conducting car seat assessments and vehicle transfer training, which reduces the amount of interruptions throughout the day for the patient’s family. Additionally, the successful provision of injury prevention resources throughout a regional hospital network involves commitment and collaboration of multiple groups to ensure vulnerable populations are being adequately served. Ongoing challenges for our team include hospital staff turnover, limited hours and availability of the injury prevention team, and lack of integration to allow staff to request consultations through a patient’s electronic medical record.

Developing better communication processes and procedures between injury prevention and clinical units is critical to patient safety, throughput and overall experience. Improving communication and collaboration is an opportunity to have a positive impact on the child’s safety at discharge and beyond.

Describe the importance of multidisciplinary partnerships in order to serve patients more efficiently.
Describe strategies for improving communication and collaboration between injury prevention teams and clinical teams.
Discuss how our team has continually assessed this process to improve patient experience and efficiency.