ACU Pediatrics care model
1Unit’s flagship program, the Accountable Care Unit care model, optimized for a pediatric setting. Understanding the needs of pediatric patients and families is key to supporting them through challenging in-hospital care.
The ACU® pediatric care model ensures the patient is the center of the team, includes the family in daily conversations and decision making, and opens communication between all team members.
Accountable Care Units are defined as geographic care areas consistently responsible for the clinical, cost, and satisfaction outcomes they produce.
Accountable Care Units have four complementary design features:
1. Unit-based physician teams
2. Structured Interdisciplinary Bedside Rounds (SIBR® rounds)
3. Unit-level performance reporting
4. Unit-level physician and nurse co-leadership
Organizing care teams by units creates predictability, cohesiveness, and better communication. At its core, the ACU is about bringing people together; to work together, to collaborate together, to care together. When you work together and look out for each other, it’s much easier to provide incredible care to patients, work doesn’t seem so hard and you’re reminded why you chose your career in the first place.
Decrease length of stay, complications, adverse events, mortality, and inappropriate resource utilization. Increase patient and staff satisfaction.
The future of pediatric care starts here.
A hospitalization of your child is a stressful event: the concern for your child’s health, and the lack of autonomy, control, interval updates and communication contribute to the sense of frustration and uncertainty.
As patients and healthcare professionals ourselves, we understand that the current delivery of hospital care does not meet your needs. Demand more, demand better!
The ACU Pediatrics Care Model puts the patient and family at the center of the care team. This means:
- significantly more bedside team-based care in which you are welcomed into the daily processes
- open discussions of interval test updates and notable events
- proactive management of potentially compounding care factors
- shared decision making remove those common causes of frustration and uncertainty
Proactively including patients in their care plan and decisions from door-to-door is what should be the norm. The ACU Pediatrics Care Model puts you and your child at the center of the care team and care plans.
Working as individuals and in silos can only achieve so much for patients. The type of proactive care that is at the core of the ACU Pediatrics Care Model creates truly patient-centered care. And it facilitates more open communication between all team members and with patients and families.
- Know when the doctor will come to see the patients – no more guessing, no more uncertainty
- Better integration of nursing shifts
- Structured information passed between shifts – keep your ‘brain’ sheets but get the key information your colleagues might ask you about
- Plan of care shared between all team members for each patient
- Better access to doctors
- Better integration of team member inputs for goals and discharge planning
Pediatrics is a rewarding but challenging setting. With pediatrics, the stakes are just higher!
The ACU Pediatrics Care Model can:
- Improve communication with patients and families
- Create a more integrated and welcoming space for patients and families
- Reduce family frustration and complaints
- Improve communication, care and discharge planning with your colleagues
- Proactively track and manage known complications of care
- Activate stakeholder groups within the unit and spread accountability amongst team members
Integrating allied health in the pediatrics setting is key to optimal patient care. The ACU Pediatrics care model can:
- Standardize allied health inputs into team communication processes
- Integrate allied health critical thinking into decision-making
- Improve discussions about patients’ goals for the day and goals for discharge
- Facilitate improved planning for continuing care needs after hospital
Pediatrics can be a challenging care environment for a Unit Leader. Additional emotional strain and pressures exist in pediatrics settings compared to other hospital settings.
The ACU Pediatrics care model can:
- Reduce patient and family frustration
- Return a sense of control and autonomy to staff, patients and families
- Reduce patient/family complaints
- Improve teamwork and unit culture
- Reduce turnover
- Foster improved inter-professional and inter-personal relationships: happier staff = happier patients and better care outcomes
- Reduce daily variability by standardizing care processes and driving those processes to the bedside to include patients and families
The ACU Pediatrics Care Model offers a step change in team performance, teamwork, collaboration and communications. The ACU Pediatrics Care Model can help facilities drive towards the Triple Aim of enhanced patient experience, improved population health, and cost reductions. It can help to achieve these aims by better supporting the staff tasked with meeting these aims.
The ACU Pediatrics Care Model program seeks to return autonomy, control, shared decision-making and accountability to the care teams delivering frontline care to patients. These are the organization’s best resources available to meet the Triple Aim goals of healthcare.
SIBR
Structured Interdisciplinary Bedside Rounds
A major constraint in hospitals is the persistence of underperforming frontline clinical care teams. Hospital physicians and nurses have never been trained to coordinate efficiently and effectively with the patient and each other at the bedside.
It’s time for a change!
With 1Unit’s SIBR rounds, care teams come together working collaboratively with patients at the bedside, sharing critical-thinking based on new data points, cross-checking information accuracy, proactively identifying deviations from the expected course and making adjustments in real-time through a developed, shared and cohesive plan designed to best meet the patient’s needs.
With 1Unit’s services, hospitals can offer the practice-based training and real-time feedback that physicians, nurses, allied health and leaders need to ensure staff become experts and remain experts in SIBR rounds.
Through tens of thousands of observations in hospital units all over the world, we identified the specific behaviors essential for physicians and nurses to master high-performance SIBR rounds.
We first created SIBR rounds for ourselves so we could be much more proactive for our patients. When we realized most hospitals have the same need, we created a solution for them too. While many hospitals have learned that the secret to proactive care is successful interdisciplinary bedside rounds, most home-grown efforts are costly, typically overlook critical details, and are prone to fail. With the experience of more than 100 launches in a variety of hospital settings, we know exactly what hospitals need for successful interdisciplinary teamwork.
Make proactive care routine, make proactive care the new normal.
