In the first of the Future Hospital Programme's new podcast series, Clara Kalu, programme lead at University College London Hospitals NHS Trust, discusses After Action Review (AAR) and explains how it can help teams learn from past events, offers examples of how AAR works in action and advocates for greater engagement from clinical teams in quality improvement initaitives.
She also explores how clinical teams use AAR as a tool to learn and how, as a facilitator, she leads these learning sessions around the four key questions of:
- 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?
Safe patient care
In the podcast, Clara explains how AAR can be used by a diverse range of teams by highlighting a recent meeting for a senior clinical team who wanted to assess how well their team had prepared for the industrial action taken by trainees. The session allowed the team to reflect on how their planning enabled their trust to continue to deliver safe patient care through the 2 days of strike action.
The brilliant thing about AAR is that it can be used for events that were really positive and in circumstances where things maybe didn't go as expected.
Listen to the podcast
To find out more about AAR, including how clinical teams can benefit from this experience, listen to the podcast.