April 30, 2013

As part of TriHealth 2020, 5200 at Bethesda North and 14AB at Good Samaritan are serving as pilot units to test innovative ways to deliver high quality care.  The goal is for all care and service providers in Nursing, Lab, Environmental Services, Nutrition Services, Pharmacy, Logistics and Transportation departments participating in the pilot, to  function at their highest professional level, so we can increase "touch-time" with the patient to provide the highest quality, safety and service.  

To provide patients with high quality care, the pilot units are striving for the Nurse and the Patient Care Assistant to perform mostly direct patient care-related activities.  Ancillary staff members on the units are reassuming some non-direct patient care tasks (previously performed by nursing) enabling the Ancillary services to utilize their expertise in service of our patients.

This TriHealth 2020 initiative is an example of spending more dollars to implement with expense reductions seen "downstream" such as a reduction in team member turnover and orientation costs, reduction in hospital acquired infections and antibiotic use/costs, reduced lengths of stay and improved patient experience for value based purchasing. The design team identified not only a shift of tasks to the appropriate staff members, but the need to add tasks not currently assigned.  This resulted in an increase of staff and implementation cost.

A few examples of things being piloted are:

• Pharmacy techs delivering medications from the tube station to the medication boxes
• Environmental Services pulling trash and dirty linen more frequently and taking over additional cleaning previously done by Nursing
• Transportation/Volunteers doing all patient discharges
• Nutrition Services providing catering services on night shift
• Laboratory assisting nurses with Nurse Draws by placing the blood in the tubes, applying the label and transporting the blood to the Lab
• Logistics stocking Isolation Carts

The team is already seeing positive results. 

• Nurses and PCAs report they can spend more time in direct patient-care related activities.
• Linen and trash are consistently emptied before they are overflowing. 
• Environmental Services is ensuring better disinfection of items since their experts perform the cleaning. 
• Laboratory is educating nurses on how to more safety and effectively collect blood samples. 
• Nurses no longer have to leave the bedside to discharge patients.
• Transportation is able to better track their volumes. 
• Patients who need assistance opening items are consistently getting support from Catering Associates. 
• Items needed for patients in isolation are immediately available to the nurse because Logistics is stocking the carts.

Many different things will be piloted to develop the best possible processes.  Once the best processes are developed, they will be shared with other units.

Congratulations to these staff members on a successful first month of trials and thanks for serving as pioneers of change in our system.  Please offer your support to them as they venture forward.