Huddles in Hospital Maternity Settings: A Scoping Review

Abstract

Background: The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality recommends the use of safety huddles, in which clinicians are briefly gathered to review a patient's condition, including new or developing changes in acuity or stability. The Joint Commission describes huddles as a "hallmark" of high-reliability organizations. Previous reviews have confirmed the general utility of huddles, including positive regard by clinicians, but there has not been work specifically looking at huddle use in hospital maternity care settings. Our objective was to identify the ways that huddles have been studied or reported in inpatient maternity settings and synthesize this information with recommendations from professional organizations to identify gaps in the literature published in the United States since 1999.

Methods: We used Arksey and O'Malley's framework to guide our scoping review. Using the time frame from 1999 to 2024, we searched the following databases: PubMed, CINAHL, SCOPUS, Embase, as well as gray literature and the reference lists and citing articles of the included manuscripts.

Results: We found 160 documents, of which 47 met inclusion criteria, including 11 care bundles, 10 quality improvement projects, and 4 research studies. The remaining 22 were a variety of editorials, position papers, and other gray literature.

Discussion: There is scant research on the use of huddles in hospital maternity care settings, and most literature does not define the participants, timing, or agenda of the huddle. Further research is needed to understand how huddles affect outcomes in maternity settings. Researchers should explicitly define the huddles they are studying. The review protocol was registered at Open Science Framework Registries.