Learning from critical case reviews: Emergent themes and their impact on practice

SummaryThis paper describes the process of conducting critical case reviews as part of a leadership programme for critical care. Forty-five cases were reviewed over 2 years in five different hospitals and permission was sought from local research ethics committees and research and development committees for the discussions to be treated as research data. Typically the cases presented were patients with complex needs whose trajectory of care had not gone smoothly.Key themes to emerge from the case reviews were:
• Communication failures between professional groups, between professionals themselves, between staff and families, between wards and departments and between different hospitals. Documentation was also often less than satisfactory.
• Teams often had problems in working together as a team and different professionals often had different expectations of other members of the team.
• Individual actions may compensate for weaknesses in formal clinical risk systems.The case reviews themselves were showcases of the difficulties the health service faces every day and the challenges of communicating effectively. The case reviews provided an effective medium to both resolve those difficulties and model a means through which teams could effectively manage and communicate patient care issues. Furthermore their strength as a learning tool was attributed to team learning as a powerful catalyst for change.