The COVID-19 pandemic provided a renewed opportunity to promote easier identification of healthcare professionals within healthcare facilities. Healthcare workers had to work with new people in facilities they weren't always familiar with. This situation, already present before the pandemic with the growth of temporary staffing, persists today. Even now, healthcare professionals wear virtually identical uniforms, certainly with badges, but these are impossible to read while moving or from more than a meter away. Surgical masks, caps, and sometimes even surgical gowns are also used. In this context, which can lead to misunderstandings and incidents, it is essential to implement strategies to facilitate identification within healthcare facilities. Facilitated identification: a key to developing soft skills. Facilitated identification is a best practice for ensuring reliable healthcare. It allows every healthcare worker to know their name and role at a glance. This knowledge is highly valuable operationally: knowing who is who and who is capable of doing what, here and now. Facilitated identification can take several forms: a cap with the wearer's name and role embroidered or printed on it. Caps with a Velcro area, on which, as in some military or fire service environments, healthcare workers can attach their name tag, role, etc. This may seem surprising: the roles and names of professionals are not always known by other members of the group. Furthermore, even if they are known, remembering the identity and roles of all personnel in an environment with high turnover (students, temporary staff, reinforcements, etc.) is time-consuming and unreliable in a crisis. Roles therefore often remain implicit. We address each other without making a mistake… without using first names… which can sometimes lead to a lack of communication for fear of offending someone we've been working with for several months.

Let's also note the unconscious biases to which healthcare professionals can be exposed: a woman and a man enter a patient's room: she is a nurse and he is a doctor.

In emergency situations, these confusions linked to implicit biases could have detrimental effects on patient care.

Knowing the name and role of the different people on a team facilitates communication and, consequently, teamwork.

Many healthcare incidents are linked to communication errors. Easier identification thus promotes an additional security measure by making communication processes between healthcare professionals more reliable. Addressing someone by their first name is always more effective. This helps to humanize interactions, capture attention more easily, and avoid misidentification.

Easy identification also helps to build team cohesion more quickly.

To outsource the information needed for easy identification (first name, role) and thus free up the working memory of healthcare professionals, the use of personalized caps is a good practice to adopt.

While easy identification can be implemented in many ways, the fabric personalized cap is one of the methods that seems to be the most effective and also the most environmentally friendly.

SafeTeam Academy and Easy Identification

SafeTeam Academy has made soft skills such as communication and teamwork a recurring theme in its training programs.

Most of the immersive video programs feature Simulated care situations challenge healthcare professionals on their practices regarding information sharing, secure communication, and teamwork, leading them to constantly verify a number of fundamental elements for patient safety. In this spirit, the Safeteam Academy is proud to present the personalized cap solution to improve the reliability of care in your healthcare facilities. Nearly all of our intensive care and operating room training programs promote personalized caps. As proof, here is a photo taken in the recovery room during our module Information Sharing and Improvement of Care in the PACU. src="https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/61f1c5bbc327ec3679e7457c/6720eb487b248bc303c15f8e_62bea7a3e401bd36de9497ae_Capture%2520d%25E2%2580%2599e%25CC%2581cran%25202022-07-01%2520a%25CC%2580%252009.51.25.png" width="auto" height="auto" loading="lazy">

SafeTeam Academy Course: Transmission and Reliability of Care in PACU

If you too would like to participate in improving the reliability of care within your facilities, the SafeTeam Academy training courses are perfect for you! To learn more, write to the following address: contact@safeteam.academy.