Collaborative Care Teams: Essential for Quality & Efficient Health Care

Collaborative care teams are essential for quality and efficient work in health care systems. Collaborative care is defined as a model that is designed to improve the outcome of patients through cooperation among inter-professionals. This mainly involves a tertiary or even a primary care team that is tasked to work with health professionals such as physiotherapists, dieticians, medical specialists, and mental health professionals. The need for effective collaboration is usually based on the call to encourage patients, their loved ones, and even healthcare providers for them to remain active in their duty and service provision. Through this collaboration, the quality outcome is realized; there is an improvement in patient safety, patient experience, and effective use of resources. It is important to note that collaborative care prioritizes patients. It is founded on commitment, mainly to service providers who are in leadership positions to make the collaboration run smoothly, the contribution from highly experienced practitioners, and effective communication for everyone in the team.

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Collaborative care teams will benefit the hospital in that nurses from different backgrounds and different levels of expertise are allowed to perform hence a more diverse and effective operation. Another way in which hospital benefit is through professional development as well as increased knowledge among the juniors since the team members comprise of individuals with different experiences and extensive knowledge (Ratzlaff et al., 2016). Besides this, the partnership that exists between a patient, health care providers, and the patient's loved ones in coordination and decision making enhance the outcome hence building a good reputation for the said hospital. It is also true to say that collaborative teams create excellent opportunities for considerations and ideas to be looked into clearly hence minimizing errors, miscommunications, and unnecessary reworks in the hospitals.

Benefits of CCT to patients

Patients benefit in that there is improved patient engagement and education during care provision. Approaches used to communicate to the patients are usually responsive and consistent, thus contributing to the patient's peace of mind (Painter et al., 2017). Patients also benefit in terms of safety as medical errors reduce when there is a strong interprofessional collaboration and efficient teams that have been trained to work cooperatively, safely, and in a coordinated style to remove gaps in quality care provision.

Benefits of CCT to clinical staff

Fostering collaborative teams is beneficial to the staff as it enhances staff retention and satisfaction. Other benefits that clinical staff enjoys include a higher perception of recognition as well as empowerment. This is attributed to the fact that collaborative teams' power structure is more horizontal than hierarchical, it is more inclusive and open to communication, and there exist greater levels of respect, harmony, understanding, and appreciation among the members.

Structure of CCT

Collaborative care teams comprised of health care providers with a range of functional expertise. Although they could be having different perspectives, their experience and skills are usually similar. The team must also include the patients, close family members to the patients, and other stakeholders (Pfaff & Markaki, 2017). In most cases, integrating a spectrum of the team is put in place. The power structure is usually horizontal and not hierarchical, thus allowing for inclusiveness and more open communication. The organizational structure, on the other hand, includes both architectural and management considerations.

Oversight and assessment

Assessment begins before rolling out the program. Case managers are expected to assess first the willingness and the ability of patients and health care providers to engage collaboratively. The assessment is done on social situations by collecting data about the community and the family where a hospitalized patient would be discharged. The assessment data is usually subjective as people talk about their feelings, needs, and perspectives about the patient's condition. After rolling out the program, oversight and assessment are done using instruments that have been designed to determine the collaboration score quantitatively. These instruments focus on nurse-physician professions and mono-disciplinary teams. Other tools with psychometric analysis include the Assessment of Interprofessional Team Collaboration Scale (AITCS) and the Role Perceptions Questionnaire generic form.

Operational/ Financial risks

When operating in collaborative care, there are various challenges that the hospital, the patients, and even their family members may come across. Among them is maintaining effective coordination among all the stakeholders involved. The inadequacy of one person or group might lead to the failure of the whole team. There are also financial challenges since the number of players is many hence the need for higher funding. Anytime there is inadequate funding, the program might fail.

Timeline for implementation

The implementation of collaborative care teams is based on the level of preparedness. With proper planning and a clear layout of how the program will be running, the application can take place in 3 to 4 months.

Conclusion

A collaborative care team is designed to improve outcomes in health care centers. It brings on board professionals with different skills and experience, patients, and close family members to the patient. Decisions, communication, and respect are usually emphasized and easy to realize due to the horizontal power structure. The model is beneficial to both the patients and clinical staff as it improves patient experience, safety, as well as staff satisfaction. Although there are financial and operational risks in implementing the model, with proper planning, the timeline of implementation cannot exceed six months.

References

Painter, J. T., Fortney, J. C., Austen, M. A., & Pyne, J. M. (2017). Cost-effectiveness of telemedicine-based collaborative care for posttraumatic stress disorder. Psychiatric Services, 68(11), 1157-1163. DOI https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ps.201600485Pfaff, K., & Markaki, A. (2017). Compassionate, collaborative care: an integrative review of quality indicators in end-of-life care. BMC palliative care, 16(1), 65. DOI https://doi.org/10.1186/s12904-017-0246-4

Ratzlaff, A., Unutzer, J., Katon, W., & Stephens, K. A. (2016). Integrated care: Creating effective mental and primary health care teams. John Wiley & Sons. Retrieved from https://books.google.co.ke/books?hl=en&lr=&id=nOJ8CwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PR9&dq=collaborative+care+teams&ots=Gnuw-woW9a&sig=n400_22EY_0ZJEN5hPiMoqQO-Hg&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=collaborative%20care%20teams&f=false