Welcome - Positive Words

Have a question about Positive Wordss? Had some experience with using it that you could share and that might help others? Found a particularly effective way of adapting it to your hospital? Please post it here in this section of the forum.

Positive words and even more positive atmosphere -
Following the staff meeting and our champion spreading the word among the staff we started the ‘positive words’ intervention on the 5th February 2014. We adapted our handover sheet and added a little prompt in each box to make a positive remark/comment.
It wasn’t a challenge to say something positive about each patient and it made everyone in handover smile. Afterwards the staff commented about how this had started the shift off on a positive note.
As a management team we have been addressing some of the staff’s negative attitudes when arriving on the ward and what we found really encouraging after we began this intervention was how as a team other staff members were reflecting back to their colleagues how their negativity was affecting them. This in turn made those staff members think about how they were coming across and they have begun to change.
There’s been much more laughter and smiles coming from the staff and the patients have commented on how this makes them feel more able to approach the staff with their requests.

Well for me its about changing things around, if the patient has just been admitted they are naturally angry. Rather stay they were just admitted, feeling anxious and letting off a bit of steam. Don't always read the notes before you meet the patient. Notes can give us a bad impression, eg if a patient has a forensic history. Meet the patient first, look for the positive, yes the forensic shouldn't be forgotten, use it as part of your risk assessment and not against the patient. Look for the good things they have done that day, don't jump in with the bad. Its worth remembering a detained patient feels lost, lonely and like they haven't got their own lives in control, so make them feel wanted, not lost. Sit with them, takes away the loneliness and remember to tell them being detained isn't a punishment. Turn the bad into good.

This is having a great knock on effect on your ward! I am definately going to talk about and get an area in our handover book where we can adopt this practice. Wonderful idea.