What is your experience with teams and where do you fit on the continuum of team based care?
Questions to assess your current practice:
What does the team look like in your office?
How does the team communicate?
What are the roles of each team member?
What are the current workflows in clinic that involve the team?
Where do you fall on the team based care continuum? Take the survey to get started.
There are 4 key pillars to building team-based care
1. Enhancing the understanding of roles: with a shared understanding of individual provider roles including the identification, appreciation, and subsequent respect of each discipline’s value in patient-centred care.
If your clinic does not already have established and well-understood roles take an opportunity to evaluate these. Roles should include regular tasks and scope of practice for the individual. It is important to define this as then healthcare professionals can ascertain where their roles may overlap. Check out the examples in the position profiles (p.35) section of the employee handbook template, or evaluation of roles.
2. Establishing a collective ownership of goals: involving the active participation of all providers and patients in achieving mutual goals for patient care.
In order to establish the collective ownership of patient-centred care goals it is imperative you create space for the clinic team to communicate with each other. Meeting regularly with the team can improve team culture and information sharing. Involving the entire team highlights their contribution and unique skill set in effectively running the clinic/team huddle.
3. Building interdependence: with the reciprocal reliance of provider interaction to reach mutual goals. It also encompasses the need to examine the level of equality of power within the relationship.
Interdependence of staff within the medical home is dependent on understanding roles. After this is established, leaders need to examine how they empower these individuals to share care for the patient population. Understanding the general workflows within the clinic establishes a baseline if you have the “right person doing the right task for the right patient at the right time.” Confirm the Share-the-Care worksheet and assess team roles and tasks today.
4. Supporting knowledge exchange: sharing information that is vital to the care of the patient and includes a provider’s willingness to do so.
Knowledge should be a shared commodity within a medical home. Knowledge exchange in a high-functioning team enables informational continuity, breaking down information silos. It is an effort to keep all members in the team in the loop and is largely dependent on establishing how and when you communicate with each other. These actions enable trust in shared care. Refresh your skills or learn more through these 7C’s to effective communication.7 C’s of effective communication.
Cambridge Health Alliance (CHA) Model of Team-Based Care Implementation Guide and Toolkit Somava Stout, Christine Klucznik, Aimee Chevalier, Rachel Wheeler, Jennifer Azzara, Laureen Gray,Deborah Scannell, Luann Sweeney, Mary Saginario, Isabelle Lopes.
Sound Mind Podcast – The benefit of team based care (Canadian Medical Association Physicians Wellness Hub)
One Nail at Time Podcast – Episode 9 Team base care (Alberta Medical Association ACCT)
Stutsky BJ, Spence Laschinger H. Development and testing of a conceptual framework for interprofessional collaborative practice. Health and Interprofessional Practice. 2014;2(2):eP1066. doi: 10.7710/2159-1253.1066. [CrossRef] [Google Sch
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Kidd Wagner K, Austin J, Toon L, Barber T, Green LA. A principled approach for scaling up primary care transformation in Alberta: Insights from cognitive science studies. Edmonton, AB: University of Alberta; 2018 Sept (Unpublished Report).
