Medical Grand Rounds, collegiate working, and improving patient safety.

A senior clinical manager recently stated: "In University Hospitals Plymouth, if medicine doesn’t work then nothing works."

From January 2024 I have inspired, initiated and facilitated collaborative working to reinvigorate the long neglected Medical Grand Round in Plymouth with the purpose of improving team working, education and patient safety.

The Medical Grand Round includes intergenerational education (students, doctors in training, senior medical, allied to medicine, and others), to build collaboration from the bottom, and through this both improve safe, effective, efficient patient care, and harness discretionary effort. The benefits include: individual and collaborative medical education; showcasing of local services; opportunities for students and doctors in training to complete portfolios; helping all physicians to be a little more of a generalist; and finding ways of laughing together.

In addition there has been a systematic enabling of physicians to rediscover each other and develop positive relationships.

The Plymouth Medical Grand Round is a work in progress, is still fragile, but is beginning to flourish.

The research proposal is to use this Grand Round re-start as an opportunity for qualitative researchers to identify what, why, and how the Medical Grand Round works to improve the delivery of safe and effective healthcare within an an organisation under pressure. It is highly likely that these findings could then be disseminated and used to share best practice with the wider NHS community.