A recently implemented team-based approach to treatment at Belleville General and Trenton Memorial hospitals has produced good results not only for patients but for the medical staff as well.
At the end of last year two doctors announced they were leaving the organization putting an already overworked medical staff into what Chief of Staff Dr. Colin MacPherson has called a staffing crisis.
MacPherson said his staff sent a clear message.
“They did two things, one is they said look we’re committed to this but two was something’s gotta change. So it was by no means a revolt but more of a call to action.”
MacPherson told the board “there was no way we were going to recruit our way out of this. This had become an unsustainable situation. Morale had hit rock bottom.”
Out of the staffing crisis came the creation of Internal Medicine/Family Medicine/Nurse Practitioner Teams.
Then the difficult work of putting multi-disciplinary teams together had to be done. Nurse Practitioners and Physician Assistants were recruited and technology updated with dashboards providing real time data on patients’ medical issues, care, and condition to be shared with team members.
The team-based care model was built around the premise of “the right care by the right person at the right time.”
“With the team-based approach we’re seeing a better distribution of patients based on number and also on complexity and acuity.”
The new system has improved both patient care and the morale of the medical staff as they now are dealing with a more normal and manageable patient load on a daily basis.
Other health care organizations have heard of the system’s success and have asked Quinte Health for more information on how it works and how it was put together.
