The COVID-19 pandemic was a renewed opportunity to promote easier identification of professionals within healthcare facilities. Caregivers had to work with new people, in facilities they did not always know. This situation, already present before the pandemic with the development of temporary staffing, persists today.

Even today, healthcare professionals wear almost identical outfits, certainly with badges, but it is impossible to read them in motion or from more than a meter away. Surgical masks, caps, and sometimes even surgical gowns are added.

In this context, which can generate misunderstandings and promote the occurrence of incidents, it is essential to implement strategies to develop facilitated identification within hospitals.

Facilitated identification, a focus for facilitating non-technical skills

Facilitated identification is a good practice for making healthcare safer. It consists, for every caregiver, of knowing at a glance their name and function. This knowledge has a powerful interest on an operational level: knowing who is who and who is capable of doing what, here and now. Facilitated identification can take several forms: a cap with their name and function embroidered or printed. Caps with a scratch (velcro) area on which, as in certain military or fire-fighting environments, caregivers can affix their strip with first name and function, etc.

This may seem surprising: the roles and first names of professionals are not always known by other members of the group. Furthermore, even if they are known, remembering the identity and functions of all stakeholders in an environment facing significant turnover (students, temporary staff, reinforcements, etc.) consumes energy and is unreliable in the event of a crisis. Roles, therefore, often remain implicit. People call out to each other without making blunders... without using first names... which can sometimes lead to a lack of communication for fear of offending someone with whom they have already been working for several months.

Also note the unconscious biases to which caregivers may 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 lead to detrimental effects in patient management. 

Knowing the name and function of the different people present in a team streamlines communication and, consequently, teamwork.

Many accidents in healthcare are related to communication errors. Facilitated identification thus promotes the implementation of an additional safety guarantee by making communication processes between healthcare professionals more reliable.

Addressing a person by their first name is always more effective. It helps to humanize relationships, capture attention more easily, and avoid confusion between individuals.

Facilitated identification also makes it possible to unite teams more quickly.

To externalize the information necessary for easy identification (first name, function) and thus relieve the working memory of healthcare professionals, the use of nominative caps is a good practice to adopt. 

Although facilitated identification can be implemented in multiple ways, the fabric name cap is one of the methods that seems most effective and also the most environmentally friendly.

SafeTeam Academy and easy identification

SafeTeam Academy has made non-technical skills such as communication or teamwork a recurring theme in its training courses.

Most immersive video courses stage simulated care situations, questioning healthcare professionals about their practices in terms of handovers, secure communication, and teamwork, and prompting them to constantly verify a number of fundamental elements for patient safety.

With this in mind, the Safeteam Academy is proud to present the solution of name caps to improve the reliability of care in your healthcare facilities. Almost all of our intensive care or operating room courses promote name caps. And as proof, a photo taken in the recovery room during our Transmission and Reliability of Care in PACU module.

If you'd like to play your part in improving the reliability of care in your facilities, SafeTeam Academy training courses are for you! 

To learn more, please email us at contact@safeteam.academy.