Peer review

Peer review

A feedback process

Peer review involves giving or receiving feedback about work performance. This is a way of offering insight into how you and colleagues work and behave. While this may be challenging and make you feel uncomfortable, many people find it a positive experience. There are many ways of carrying out peer review; for the purposes of the AROMA project we are focusing on peer review with the following components:

• Discussion of adverse or critical incidents
• Identifying issues in the system and delivery of health care
• Identifying areas of concern - this may sometimes raise serious concerns about an individual's performance
• Recommending ways of improving performance and following up the review

Who are my peers?

Peers

Members of the same profession having a similar staus to those delivering care usually carry out the review of an individual or group of practitioners. The process can also be used in a multidisciplinary context when providing feedback to members of the team who may be from a different professional group.

Peers are those people who believe themselves to be at the same level in the health care team or hierarchy. This means that no one in the review should have a managerial role over another.

Using peer review

Peer review meetings

After reading the material on this website, you should be able to take away some of what you've seen and apply it in your own peer review meetings. In running your own review it is helpful to create some structure. This can be done by:

• Identifying and recording the incident

Describe what happened and the impact on the patient, the team and your practice.

• Preparing for the review

Decide who will chair the meeting and the rules that will be followed during the event. For example, confidentiality, openness, learning and support.

• Running the review

Decide how the event will run, for example, will issues be recorded and fed back to the organisation? To create some structure and direction, develop some questions to guide discussion:

• How did the incident affect the patient, you and the team?
• Could it have been avoided?
• How can we stop it from happening again?
• What learning needs have been highlighted by the review? Are these learning issues for you or for others in the team?

• Reporting

How will the group feedback what has happened to the organisation? Who will the report be circulated to? You may want to recommend that an audit is done on the same issue or that the quality committee in your hospital investigates the issue.

Key points

Things to remember

• Peer review is a way of learning from your own work and the work of others
• A review should be carried out in a supportive environment where peers can be honest and feel like they're not being judged
• The meeting should take place in a blame-free way so that the team can collectively improve care
• A good peer review is one that has clear objectives, identifies systemic deficiences and makes recommendations for taking action

Peer review resources

Further information and resources

The following additional resource is available to help you with Peer Review:

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