In conversation with the Future Hospital Partners Network, Clara Kalu, programme lead at University College London Hospitals NHS Trust, introduces After Action Review (AAR), a quality improvement tool to help clinical teams learn from past events.
Clinical teams use AAR because they want to learn. As a facilitator, I lead these learning sessions around four key questions:
- What was expected?
- What actually happened?
- Why was there a difference between what was expected and what actually happened?
- What have you learned? And what would your team do differently next time?
The brilliant thing about AAR is that is can be used for events that were really positive and in circumstances where things maybe didn't go as expected. AAR is underpinned by a series of ground rules which are aimed at levelling out hierarchy and limiting blame.
Listen to the podcast
To find out more about AAR, including how clinical teams can benefit from this experience, listen to the podcast.