Deliberate practices of speaking up and responding skills: the Speak-PREP e-learning module for healthcare professionals

Purpose Speaking up and responding to others' concerns promotes patient safety. We describe health professionals' utilisation of these important skills. Method We developed an interactive e-learning module, Speak-PREP, to train healthcare professionals in speaking up and responding strategies. Participants completed interactive video-based exercises that engaged them with entering speaking up and responding statements, augmenting strategies from a list of prompting phrases and responding to a pushback. We report strategy utilisation. Results A total of 101 health professionals completed Speak-PREP training. Most frequently used speaking up strategies were: brainstorming to explore solutions (50%), showing consideration of others (45%) and encouraging others' opinions through invitations (43%). Responding strategies included reflecting the concern expressed by colleagues, discussing next steps and expressing gratitude (70%, 67% and 50%, respectively). When prompted, participants augmented their statements with reframing concerns, asking questions to deepen understanding, using how or what to start questions and expressing curiosity (p<0.00001, p=0.003, p=0.0002 and p<0.0001, respectively). Pushbacks lead to increased use of reflecting the concern and decreasing consideration, curiosity, empathy, expressing gratitude and encouraging others' opinions (p<0.05 for all). Conclusions The Speak-PREP module targeted deliberate practice in speaking up and responding skills. Future work should examine the application of these strategies in the clinical environment.

Automated summary

This study developed an interactive e-learning module to train healthcare professionals in speaking up and responding strategies, and analyzed the utilization of these strategies. The results showed that brainstorming, showing consideration of others, and encouraging others' opinions through invitations were the most frequently used speaking up strategies, while reflecting concerns, discussing next steps, and expressing gratitude were common responding strategies.