Advanced Hospital Teams: Insight Series

Standardization

``I’ll miss things today that I could’ve noticed. And, yet, I’ll miss them.”

Every day most of us carry a fear like this through the hospital. Whether we know it or not, most of us deal with it the same way: we standardize. The way we take a history. The way we examine patients. Even how we think about our patients and write our notes.

Mental Models

Shared Mental Models: The Magical Power of Sharing Minds
“There’s a dichotomy in the way physicians think. They feel frustrated by all the things they shouldn’t be responsible for, yet can’t relinquish because they’re not surrounded by a team to support them. They don’t know who these people are who are supposed to be doing it every day, so they just hold onto it and get so frustrated by it. That’s a huge issue of burnout actually for physicians. They’re doing things they know they’re not good at and don’t want to do, but they don’t know who to hand it off to.``

Reliability

Reliability: The Simple Power of Checklists

Reliability in healthcare refers to how often we deliver the right care to the right patient at the right time.

We’re human. Hospitals are complex. And hospital units have never been designed specifically for reliability. That’s why our error rates in the hospital are on the order of 1 in 10 (McGlynn, 2013). We’re capable of much better, more like error rates of 1 in 100 if we can function as advanced hospital teams

The good news is we can do it. And the way we can do it is the core reliability insight you need to be part of a high-functioning team.

Resilience

Resilience: The Calming Power of Proactive Care

How can hospital units organize themselves to outpace the tempo of deteriorating patient condition (or deteriorating patient experience)?

The answer is resilience. What makes a hospital unit resilient is being able to stay ahead of issues as they arise. In the illustration below that foresight corresponds to the flatter part of the slope.

Empathy

Cognitive Empathy: The Simple Power of Noticing People

In the previous post we introduce the advanced teamwork concept of resilience. We applied it to a slope of clinical deterioration.

Now let’s apply the same concept of resilience to another scenario — a slope of deteriorating patient experience.

In the previous post we introduce the advanced teamwork concept of resilience. We applied it to a slope of clinical deterioration.

Now let’s apply the same concept of resilience to another scenario — a slope of deteriorating patient experience.