Collaboration is essential to the health care system because it assures every team member has access to the information they need, inefficiencies are reduced and each professional can contribute positively to patient care.. Well-coordinated collaboration across medical professions at your practice has the potential to allow for more comprehensive, population-based, cost-effective patient care and a new emphasis on health promotion and disease prevention, which will be important in meeting ongoing healthcare challenges.
During a multiple-day hospital stay, a patient may interact with about 40 different employees including nurses, physicians, technicians, and others. Focusing on a high level of collaboration among teams at your facility is critical for the success of your patients’ care during their stay.
Hucu Can Coordinate Team Communication in Healthcare Facilities
Defining Your Collaborative Approach to Health Care
A collaborative team is best defined as a group of medical practitioners from different professions who share patients and patient care goals and have responsibilities for complementary tasks regularly. Establish what these teams will look like at your organization to begin setting your staff and coworkers up for greater success.
This team should also be actively interdependent with an established means of communicating with other team members, patients, and families to ensure that various aspects of patients’ health care needs are fully integrated and addressed for the future. Technology like mobile devices is continuing to make communication more robust, strengthening the bonds between the internal and external team members.
No matter what methodology you’re using, it should address creating a system of accountability, a collaborative approach to problem-solving and help identify existing problems in the process of delivering healthcare treatment.
Manage Teams, Patients and Family Communication With Hucu
Delegating Appropriately and Respecting Job Roles
The education of health professionals is largely separated by profession, limiting the knowledge one staff member has about the skill set of another and potentially causing future problems. Learning to understand the roles and responsibilities of other professionals is important to function effectively on any team, especially in health care because the success of the team lies in providing quality treatment to patients.
While medical training and legal scopes of practice largely determine a person’s role at a health care facility the skills of various primary care practitioners canoverlap. Most health care professionals have expertise in patient interaction, developing care plans, and educating patients on future treatments and best practices for their continued health and well being.
Therefore, it is crucial to define the roles of each member of your team, beyond a simple job title to include how they will assist others in dealing with the problems plaguing patients.
Communication: Each member of the team should clearly understand the role and scopes of practice of the more common positions in health care like nurses, physicians, physical therapists, occupational therapists, pharmacists, social workers, dentists, dieticians, and psychologists. This is important to establish as a baseline to help each member of a team effectively communicate with one another.
Take Action: According to the American Nurses Association (ANA), the principles of delegation help medical professionals better reach their goals; more effectively impact the organization, and improve the care delivered to patients. When it comes to effective delegation, the essential elements include:
- Maintaining a strong emphasis on your unique skill sets as a medical professional by knowing your strengths and weaknesses.
- Defining the goals of your efforts to delegate.
- Reviewing specific sections of the law regarding delegation at a health care facility.
- Making clear those tasks or functions that cannot be delegated to others in your department.
- Identifying guidelines for lowering risks related to delegation.
- Developing a system of feedback to ensure that tasks are completed.
Holding Team Members Accountable to Specific Responsibilities and Tasks
E-Consult Coordination: The first step in coordination is to determine which team members will be responsible for a particular patient problem. Because the focus of the team should be on the needs of the patient, patient care goals determine the makeup of your team and the responsibilities each team member has to address these patient problems. It is crucial to coordinate with the members of the patient family as partners on this team to ensure they are educated on the patient’s help and how to best address ongoing care. Sharing the care of an individual patient will help give them a 360-degree approach to their treatment and overall health care experience.
Communication: Effective communication is needed to facilitate coordinated care at all times. An ideal communication system like Hucu.ai includes a well-designed digital filing system, regularly scheduled meetings to discuss patient care issues around the clock, and a mechanism for communicating with external systems.
Take Action: Coordination and communication are achieved with each of your specific responsibilities when physicians and other professionals approach one another as partners, not as competitors. It is also equally important to have systems in place to support and evaluate the collaborative practices in the organization.
