Essay Sample on Integrated Care Model: Improving Patient Outcomes Through Interprofessional Teamwork

Introduction

One of the strategies used to facilitate health care provider engagement in the integrated care model is patient outcome improvement through interprofessional teamwork. In this strategy, multiple health care providers from different professional qualifications deliver inclusive services by working with the patient, their families, nurses, pharmacists, intern, students, carers, and other people in the community to give services of the highest quality to the patient (Luxford et al., 2011). This is effective when the whole team works together through; understanding each other, having knowledge of each individual's responsibility and role, each person working effectively on his part assigned, having excellent communication from one person to another, and having good conflict management skills. This strategy helps in improving the health care access to the safety of the patient, patient outcomes, and decreases the error rate.

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This is achieved through the application of teamwork concepts/components, which include backup behavior, adaptability, mutual performance monitoring, team orientation, and team leadership (UW Department of Medicine, 2019). As a health care provider and a leader of the team, one has to have the concept of team leadership since it will help to direct the activities of the team members effectively. For instance, the team leader is the one that assigns roles and responsibility, clarifies tasks, and helps in solving conflicts (Kalisch et al., 207). Moreso, one has to have the concept of backup behavior.

Therefore one can anticipate the needs of others, thus making the teamwork easy and lively all the time. Another essential concept of team members in the health care profession is team orientation. This is because, in the health care profession, individual goals are less important as compared to those of the team. The team is meant to deliver services of the highest degree, and therefore its goals are more relevant to achieve than those of an individual team member.

The teamwork barriers include the dispersion of the team members, large team size, and team membership instability. Working with a team of so many members might be tiresome and sometimes even not competent to deliver the expected services. Team members might tend to join and to leave the team during service delivery leading to instability of team members. In contrast, members might be too dispersed order, therefore, consuming much time in the delivery of their services. However, there are various interventions to these barriers. One of them being geographic localization of physicians to a specific hospital unit.

These would help reduction in pages to physicians, would provide the foundation for other interventions, increase the frequency of face-to-face communication between physicians and nurses and also increase recognition of team members (Holden et al., 2013). Depending on the services expected from the team, the team members would be assigned their offices in such a way that it follows a direct in of the service they provide. The rearrangement would be in such a way that it does not confuse the clients or the team members themselves. For example, it would be in such a way that for a client who has visited the hospital and has an arm fracture, he/she knows that after consultation am moving directly to the x-ray room and to the dressing room which is just next to the consultation room in such a way that the consultant physician can communicate with the dressing technician direct.

Reference

Holden, R. J., Carayon, P., Gurses, A. P., Hoonakker, P., Hundt, A. S., Ozok, A. A., & Rivera-Rodriguez, A. J. (2013). SEIPS 2.0: a human factors framework for studying and improving the work of healthcare professionals and patients. Ergonomics, 56(11), 1669-1686.

Kalisch, B. J., Curley, M., & Stefanov, S. (2007). An intervention to enhance nursing staff teamwork and engagement. JONA: The Journal of Nursing Administration, 37(2), 77-84.

Luxford, K., Safran, D. G., & Delbanco, T. (2011). Promoting patient-centered care: a qualitative study of facilitators and barriers in healthcare organizations with a reputation for improving the patient experience. International Journal for Quality in Health Care, 23(5), 510-515.

UW Department of Medicine. (2019 November 23rd).Improving patient outcomes through interprofessional teamwork. retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9pHksMxliI