Workshop on Patient Flow, Teamwork & Quality Patient Care

Program overview:

Poor patient flow can have a detrimental effect on healthcare services and the welfare of both staff and patients. As in all hospitals, care is provided through many specialized departments, such as radiology, surgery and various types of patient wards, as well as by ancillary departments, such as admissions, medical records, laboratory, pharmacy, housekeeping and transportation.

A patient arriving through the emergency department encounters repeated waits as he or she progresses from one stage of care to another, waiting for rooms, equipment, physicians, nurses, technicians, beds, medications, and records.

Patient flow represents the ability of the healthcare system to serve patients quickly and efficiently as they move through these stages of care. When the system works well, each stage is completed with minimal delay. When the system is broken or overloaded, patients accumulate like a reservoir, as in the chronic delays experienced in many hospitals and emergency departments.

Thus good patient flow means that patient queuing is minimized; poor patient flow means that patients suffer considerable queuing delays. This course is designed to examine how patient flow can be improved, and this improvement will have a positive impact on the quality of healthcare services delivery.

For whom:

This program is designed for all healthcare leaders in the medical profession that form part of the medical care giver in the hospitals such as Doctors, Physician Assistants, Nurses, Pharmacists, Dentists, Technologists and technicians, Therapists and rehabilitation specialists, and service support providers, Administrative and support staff in both public and private hospitals. Hospital Business Office including Patient Access, Billing, Schedulers and others will also benefit from this program.

Learning objectives:

At the end of the program, participants will be able to;

• Synchronize healthcare service delivery process through effective coordination of tests, treatments and discharge in the hospital
• Schedule hospital resources such as “doctors, nurses and administrative support staff” to match patient patterns of arrival
• Constantly monitor and track number of patients waiting by location for immediate actions
• Create teamwork approach to patient flow management in the hospital
• Distinguish between productive waiting “e.g., recovery” from unproductive waiting “e.g. waiting for tests”
• Use collaborative approach “best practices” in hospital management around common objectives, such as reliability, patient safety and good patient flow for effective healthcare service delivery
• Outline how patient flow can be improved.
• List ways in which efficient patient flow can influence quality healthcare.
• Identify ways in which teamwork can be used to improve patient flow.

Course Outline:

Day 1: Day 1: Understanding patient flow in hospitals

• Understanding how flow affects performance
• Flow and congestion in the Hospitals
• Fast and slow passages through hospital stages of care
• Length of patient stay versus overall hospital capacity
• Identifying the space needed for effective patient flow
• How much space do we have? The annual activity cycle
• What happens when capacity is constrained?
• Hospital admission rates

Day 2: Understanding Hospital Turnover Interval

• How important is the hospital turnover interval?
• The weekly and daily activity cycle
• Flow over the course of the day
• Housekeeping matters
• The challenge of achieving early discharge
• How much capacity is needed?
• Overnight admissions
• Increases in zero-day admissions and day cases
• Peak flow rates

Day 3: Reason for Poor Patient Flow in Hospitals

• Idle capacity due to a failure to synchronize complementary hospital resources
• Inadequate communication among all coordinating units
• Inefficient processes that require more work than necessary or un-needed repetition of work.
• Patients are waiting too long to complete the discharge process.
• Poor bed control system
• Poor Housekeeping
• Growing Pressure on Healthcare Service Delivery
• Increasing admission rates and bed use

Day 4: Improving Patient Flow through Team Building and Collaborative Effort

• Team building and collaborative effort in Practice:
  • Collaborative, Cooperative, Coordinating
• Identifying Team Roles
• Building and sharing a vision
• How High-performing Teams Work?
  • Situational awareness
  • Mutual support
• Developing effective team Leadership
  • Communicating assertively
• Resolving conflicts in the medical team
  • Dealing with difficult people
• Creating a healthy and inspiring work environment
  • Running effective workplace meetings
• Strategies to boost team morale and motivation
  • How to create an empowered team?
• Supporting staff which are having stress issues
• Creating fair workloads and monitoring staff stress levels

Day 5: Strategies for Improving Patient Flow and

Quality Patient Care

• How to free up flow: possible solutions
  • Better system measurement and management
    • Queue analysis
  • Improving control systems
  • Reducing short-stay admissions
  • Achieving earlier discharge
• Process modeling to ascertain how patients are currently served
• Simulation modeling both to evaluate new processes and demonstrate the current causes of delay
• System optimization from design, to scheduling of nurses, scheduling operating rooms or facility layout

Training Methodology

Lectures, discussions, exercises, and case studies will be used to reinforce these teaching/learning methods.