Following years of just getting by and making things work staff members at the Bonnyville Covenant Health Centre have been working hard over the course of the past 12 months to develop and implement a new program designed to improve worker collaboration within the facility in an attempt to enhance the standard of service for admitted patients.
Mere months after taking a job at the local hospital, physician Travis Webster realized there was a distinct lack of communication amongst individual departments within the facility, which he felt could potentially be having an effect on patient care and so he pitched the idea of putting together a new ‘hospitalist program' in an attempt to bridge that gap.
Designed to bring the hospital's doctors, nurses, pharmacists and both occupational and physical therapists together as a closely-knit, cohesive unit when caring for and delivering information to admitted patients, the hospitalist program has been a huge hit at the local facility over the past year, so much so that provincial awards associations have started to take notice.
Last month, Covenant Health recognized the local hospitalist program team for all their work in establishing the new system, naming the group as the recipient of the provincial award for collaboration in 2014.
The program constituted a new process for service delivery towards admitted patients in Bonnyville with each of the hospital's 13 doctors now taking turns on what Webster described as a “weekly rotation” at the facility.
“Basically, this new system will see one doctor spending an entire week on 24-hour call, caring for all new admitted patients and just doing the basic rounds for that day,” Webster told the Nouvelle.
Under the previous system, Webster said doctors were often bogged down with excess work, leading to a collapse of proper communication between themselves, nurses and patients.
“When I first came to Bonnyville, the first thing I realized is that every patient, once admitted, were under the care of their family doctor… The difficulty with that system is that physician is then on call 24-hours a day, seven days a week, so it becomes difficult for them to do other things,” Webster said. “So basically, when a doctor would come in at 8 a.m. they would have a maximum of an hour to go and see all of their admitted patients before they had to run off and do other things.”
That's where, according to Webster, problems started to arise, as the doctors didn't have enough time to discuss possible treatment plans with nurses.
“There was a real break down in communication that I felt we needed to improve on,” Webster said. “Thankfully, the entire team here at the hospital really bought into it.”
The new process allows for doctors to spend time with nurses, pharmacists and therapists to discuss potential issues before going in and addressing each individual patient together as a team.
“The patients really like that, when we're all able to go in together and speak to them” said Adele Makaruk, assistant head nurse at the facility. “They really feel like they're getting the best bang for their buck.”
While some would perhaps expect there to be some significant growing pains when trying to implement a brand new system at a busy hospital, Makaruk says the program has been just as big a hit amongst local staff as it has been for patients.
“There were a few really minor hurdles we had to overcome when we first brought the system in, but nothing too serious,” Makaruk said. “On the whole, I think everything changed over really smoothly. I think everyone here at the facility saw the bigger picture and knew how much of a benefit this would be to our patients. They saw the benefits this would bring regarding us all working together as a team.”
For Webster, while he admitted he was pleased to have been able to play an integral part in improving the health care delivery system in Bonnyville, he believes the rest of the staff at the facility deserve a lot of credit for buying into the idea of making things better.
“The whole reason we decided to do this was to improve health care and try and make things better for everybody. To do that, you really need to have a cohesive group and I feel we definitely have that now here in Bonnyville,” Webster said. “I'm very proud and impressed by the hospital as a whole – every single department worked hard to ensure this new system has been a successful as it has been.”
He added, “I expected there to be a lot more bumps than there were, but everyone here was just so open to change and so willing to try new things in an attempt to improve the level, standard and quality of service delivery. I'm very proud of what we've been able to achieve collectively as a team.”
