An interdisciplinary plan entails a series of activities created by a team of professionals from various fields, such as doctors, nurses, nutritionists, and informaticists. Healthcare institutions face problems that affect these professionals.
These include medical errors, staff shortages, the inadequacy of resources, and poor working conditions. These problems affect productivity issues, patient safety, and quality care delivery and can ruin an organization’s reputation hence the need for their management.
Interdisciplinary teams can help discuss and develop solutions to such problems. This essay evaluates an interdisciplinary plan that can help solve the staff shortage problem, and change theory, a leadership strategy, and a collaboration strategy can support the plan’s success.
The interdisciplinary plan aims to reduce the consequences of staff shortages. Another objective is to balance the number of staff in the organization with the department’s needs to prevent overload in some departments and deficiency in others.
An essential objective of the interdisciplinary team is to reduce the consequences of staff shortage. According to Patel et al. (2021), staff shortage leads to an overload of the existing staff, decreased motivation and productivity, and increased nurses’ burnout and turnover.
Staff shortage is inversely proportional to patient safety and care quality. The organization may be forced to employ underqualified staff to manage the shortage, compromising care quality and patient safety. The interdisciplinary plan proposed is cross-training of healthcare professionals.
Impacting new skills will enhance diversity and increase the productivity of these healthcare professionals (Patel et al., 2021). Departments will then easily balance the nurses without significant changes in care quality and patient safety. The primary goal is to improve care quality, patient safety, and organizational performance.
The best change theory to apply is Kurt Lewin’s theory. The theory entails three comprehensive stages. The first stage, unfreezing, entails defining the problem, identifying causes, explaining the need for change, and mapping the change process (Tran & Gandolfi, 2019).
The stage includes other aspects such as budgeting and resource allocation/planning. The stage entails staff support to implement the change. In this case, offering to pay for staff cross-training programs or sponsoring them halfway will help produce better outcomes.
The second stage, moving, will entail implementing the change (Hussain et al., 2018). People change their way of doing things, attitudes, and feelings. The stage will entail actual staff training, the assumption of new roles, and access to the accrued benefits of completing the program.
The last stage, refreezing, entails activities that will ensure the permanency of the change to ensure it becomes the new practice standard. Revising the organizational policy to include a clause legitimizing and favoring cross-training will be integral in this case.
Staff support/empowerment is the chosen leadership strategy that is highly likely to help improve the plan’s buy-in and implementation. Professional empowerment is done through increasing access to resources and information.
Tran and Gandolfi (2019) note that an organization that supports its staff increases productivity and retention. Sponsoring their education in various fields-cross training and providing post-training benefits such as an increase in salary or promotion will help manage the change.
Cross-training is rigorous because professionals take up intensive training while still working. The organization should put up interventions such as giving them more free time to attend lessons and physical training and studying while working is difficult hence the need for support.
Professionals try hard to balance work, studies, and family; without adequate support, they may neglect one aspect, leading to poor family relations, decreased productivity, or poor performance (Tran & Gandolfi, 2019). Thus, staff support/empowerment is the collaborative strategy of choice in this interdisciplinary plan.
Shared decision-making is the collaboration intervention of choice. Without interprofessional collaboration, conflicts arise, and the organization’s daily activities are stalled, leading to poor performance. Shared decision-making is an intervention that incorporates interprofessional perspectives in making decisions (Jeanne et al., 2019).
The decisions made are fair and acceptable to all involved professionals leading to better quality decisions and patient outcomes. Professionals also feel valued when involved in decision-making. Representatives from professional teams also help increase buy-in from professionals.
They will help present the interests of the professional team to the executive team hence inclusivity. Professionals will share responsibilities matching their qualifications and experience, and disruptive innovations will be easily leveraged after the professions engage in shared decision-making.
The hospital will begin by cross-training doctors and nurses, the healthcare professionals with the worse shortage. Training a nurse or a doctor is too expensive, and cross-training costs are significantly lower than training and hiring a new professional.
These professionals are also scarce. The hospital will liaise with a local nursing college to provide the training because running the training in an institution will be more expensive in the long run. The hospital will train 100 of the 300 nurses and 40 of the 120 physicians yearly.
The intention is to ensure optimum training and to prevent overwhelming the organization with the training needs. The hospital will invest in lecturers from various schools to teach online classes. There will also be physical lessons for clinical teaching and skills impaction.
The cost of training one nurse is estimated at $4000 and a physician $6000, an estimated total of $1.92 million for the three years. The hospital will liaise with a local university to ensure it delivers the best training accredited by institutions to the staff.
Cross-training staff is expensive but increases the organization’s efficiency despite the staff shortage. Cross-training also increases the professionals’ value hence a decreased need for hiring specialists, which is an expensive affair, and the specialists are scarce.
The plan will also reduce medical errors, staff turnover, and burnout related to shortages and work overload. The plan will take three years to help maintain the training costs and prevent them from overburdening the organization. The plan will lead to a better organization and will thus solve the problems arising from staff shortages.
For this assessment, you will create a 2-4 page plan proposal for an interprofessional team to collaborate and work toward driving improvements in the organizational issue you identified in the second assessment.
For this assessment, use the context of the organization where you conducted your interview to develop a viable plan for an interdisciplinary team to address the issue you identified. Define a specific patient or organizational outcome or objective based on the information gathered in your interview.
The goal of this assessment is to clearly lay out the improvement objective for your planned interdisciplinary intervention of the issue you identified. Additionally, be sure to further build on the leadership, change, and collaboration research you completed in the previous assessment. Look for specific, real-world ways in which those strategies and best practices could be applied to encourage buy-in for the plan or facilitate the implementation of the plan for the best possible outcome.
Additionally, be sure that your plan addresses the following, corresponding to the grading criteria in the scoring guide. Please study the scoring guide carefully so you understand what is needed for a distinguished score.
Describe an objective and predictions for an evidence-based interdisciplinary plan to achieve a specific goal of improving patient or organizational outcomes.
Explain a change theory and a leadership strategy supported by relevant evidence that will most likely help an interdisciplinary team succeed in collaborating and implementing, or creating buy-in for, the project plan.
Explain the collaboration an interdisciplinary team needs to improve the likelihood of achieving the plan’s objective. Include best practices of multidisciplinary collaboration from the literature.
Explain organizational resources, including a financial budget, needed for the plan to succeed and the impacts on those resources if the improvements described in the plan are not made.
Communicate the interdisciplinary plan, with clear, logically organized, and professional writing, with correct grammar and spelling, using the current APA style.
See Also:
NURS-FPX4010 Assessment 4 Stakeholder Presentation.
Interviews provide vital information that helps plan and implement care interventions. After an interview with Mrs. Judy, a Nurse practitioner and the charge nurse in the ICU, the issues identified were medication errors and hospital-acquired infections. The issue selected is catheter-acquired urinary tract infections. The desired outcome is the eradication of CAUTIs in the intensive care unit of MedStar Union Hospital. This proposal focuses on developing an interdisciplinary intervention plan to address CAUTIs.
The objective is to engage an interprofessional team in creating a care bundle to prevent catheter-acquired urinary tract infections. The objective aligns with the directional organizational strategies to ensure a healthier population free of preventable disease and reduce the costs, safety issues, morbidity, and mortality associated with CAUTIs.
The resources required are rather few and will facilitate stakeholder communication. Each team member discussing the change intervention will receive an appreciation token of $1000 after the care bundle is ready to be implemented. Costs of the care bundle will be determined as the team discussions continue and the specific care interventions are agreed upon. Other resources include utilities such as electricity, snacks and electric gadgets to facilitate the meetings.
The plan will affect processes in catheter insertion, care, and removal. It will streamline the processes to increase accountability, quality, and safety measures to ensure quality patient outcomes.
The proposed plan will significantly increase the workload of the professionals involved (in the interprofessional team). The plan will increase their workload by over 15% during the preparation phase, but most duties will be delegated during implementation, thus sharing the workload. They will be required to spare time from their busy schedule and during their free time to brainstorm ideas and evaluate research and available resources to develop recommendations for CAUTI management. Incentives and rewards for their time and hard work are thus necessary.
The theory of interest is Kurt Lewin’s 3 stage theory. The theory will facilitate the change process. The first stage, unfreezing, will help prepare to gain buy-in for the project by showcasing the significance of the new interventions and the effects of remaining and the current state. The second stage, moving, will help support the care providers and other stakeholders in the implementation process to implement change (Saleem et al., 2019). The third stage, refreezing, will entail cementing the change into the organizational culture. The theory will provide a framework and rationale for interventions, from plan development to policy development. It will also help plan activities in the plan and systematically organize them for quality outcomes.
The leadership strategy of interest is developing and sharing the strategic vision, goals, and objectives. The strategy can be ignored or implemented without the attention it requires. According to Fixen et al. (2020), sharing the strategic vision, goals, and objectives helps gather professionals with the same ideas and desires. The vision, goals, and objectives also guide all the activities in the plan and will help gather the relevant resources and avoid confusion and conflicts that arise during project implementation processes.
The team members for the interdisciplinary plan proposal will include the nurse manager, the infection control professional, the health informaticist, the physician in the ICU, and the charge nurse. Through healthcare facility data analysis, the health informaticist will lead the root cause analysis process to determine the major causes of the rising CAUTI burden. The charge nurse will evaluate care delivery to determine gaps and the reasons for the failure of previously implemented interventions toward CAUTI management.
The physician will provide vital information and expert opinion and help gain buy-in from other professionals. The infection control nurse will lead the team in research to determine the best evidence-based interventions to manage the problem. The nurse manager will review the plan developed by the team members and make approval decisions and release funds. She will also represent the project’s interests to the executive management team. The team members are leaders in their units and will lead the activities, help diffuse the innovation and gain buy-in from professionals in their specific areas of jurisdiction.
The team collaboration strategy is clear team member role communication. Each team member must understand their role to prevent confusion and reluctance to implementing activities. The lack of clear-cut roles often leaves the team members to guess facts due to a lack of understanding or agreement. Fox et al. (2021) note that role sharing and communication enhance participation, as each member feels significant to the team. It also pushes them to perfect their work to produce quality outcomes, unlike when a group approach to roles is used. Individuals can tend to be reluctant or inactive, leaving the burden to fall on others instead of implementing them.
Shared-decision making will also help promote collaboration in this project. According to Michalsen et al. (2019), shared decision-making makes team members feel important. It also stimulates their participation as they participate in every step of the project’s implementation. The team must agree on the best interventions to include in the care bundle and resources to utilize in implementation. Agreed-upon decisions are thus significant to the success of the interprofessional team in addressing the issue at hand. These two strategies will guide team collaboration. In this team, the members will decide on the best interventions to implement among the available options, such as checklists, clinician education, patient education, audits, and healthcare dashboard utilization for better patient outcomes (Hernandez et al., 2019).
The proposed plan is to create a care bundle for CAUTIs. The plan is to reorganize activities such as indication, insertion, care, and removal to improve efficiency and outcomes (Hernandez et al., 2019). The needed resources include standardized terminologies for indications and checklist tools to ensure the recommendations by the team are implemented without fail. The organization has a robust health information system, which is one of the requirements of this planning proposal. The intervention will entail process streamlining, hence no additional staff needs. Access to care information and data on CAUTIs to derive causal relationships is necessary. There are no costs incurred because the data is stored in the hospital servers, and the care providers involved have access to the data.
The resources needed for the plan proposal are minimal and include resources required to facilitate professional meetings of an interprofessional team, such as a board room, projector, laptop, and other utilities such as electricity. The cost of facilitating the interprofessional plan proposal is thus $8000, which will cater for the interprofessional team incentives/rewards and other utilities such as electricity required to facilitate the meetings.
Other costs will be incurred in implementing the proposed intervention if the interventions require any purchase. The interprofessional team will create end-products, such as instructions to implement new processes for the nurses and other care providers. Several factors can lead to the interprofessional approach’s failure to manage the problem, such as deviations or misappropriation of the resources. The failure can cost the organization over $8000. Hence, a keen evaluation of the approach before implementation and a possible pilot study is necessary to prevent possible losses and protect the organization’s financial security.
CAUTIs are an issue of interest at MedStar Hospital. An interprofessional approach is necessary to help implement corrective interventions to reduce the CAUTI rates. The interprofessional team consists of various members who will oversee the team activities and change implementation processes. The interprofessional approach is manageable, and Kurt Lewin’s theory, alongside leadership and collaboration strategies, will enhance the intervention’s success. The care bundle will take the perspective of various professionals, resulting in better outcomes.
Fixsen, A., Seers, H., Polley, M., & Robins, J. (2020). Applying critical systems thinking to social prescribing: a relational model of stakeholder “buy-in.” BMC Health Services Research, 20, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-020-05443-8
Fox, S., Gaboury, I., Chiocchio, F., & Vachon, B. (2021). Communication and interprofessional collaboration in primary care: from ideal to reality in practice. Health Communication, 36(2), 125-135. https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2019.1666499
Hernandez, M., King, A., & Stewart, L. (2019). Catheter-associated urinary tract infection (CAUTI) prevention and nurses’ checklist documentation of their indwelling catheter management practices. Nursing Praxis in New Zealand, 35(1). https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340445613_Catheter-associated_urinary_tract_infection_CAUTI_prevention_and_nurses’_checklist_documentation_of_their_indwelling_catheter_management_practices
Michalsen, A., Long, A. C., Ganz, F. D., White, D. B., Jensen, H. I., Metaxa, V., Christiane, H., Jos, L., Ribert, T., Jozef, K., Anna, M., & Curtis, J. R. (2019). Interprofessional shared decision-making in the ICU: a systematic review and recommendations from an expert panel. Critical Care Medicine, 47(9), 1258-1266. https://doi.org/10.1097/CCM.0000000000003870
Saleem, S., Sehar, S., Afzal, M., Jamil, A., & Gilani, S. A. (2019). Accreditation: application of Kurt Lewin’s theory on private health care organizational change. Saudi Journal of Nursing and Health Care, 2, 12. https://doi.org/10.36348/sjnhc.2019.v02i12.003
For this assessment you will create a 2-4 page plan proposal for an interprofessional team to collaborate and work toward driving improvements in the organizational issue you identified in the second assessment.
The health care industry is always striving to improve patient outcomes and attain organizational goals. Nurses can play a critical role in achieving these goals; one way to encourage nurse participation in larger organizational efforts is to create a shared vision and team goals (Mulvale et al., 2016). Participation in interdisciplinary teams can also offer nurses opportunities to share their expertise and leadership skills, fostering a sense of ownership and collegiality.
You are encouraged to complete the Budgeting for Nurses activity before you develop the plan proposal. The activity consists of seven questions that will allow you the opportunity to check your knowledge of budgeting basics and as well as the value of financial resource management. The information gained from completing this formative will promote success with the Interdisciplinary Plan Proposal. Completing this activity also demonstrates your engagement in the course, requires just a few minutes of your time, and is not graded.
Reference
Mulvale, G., Embrett, M., & Shaghayegh, D. R. (2016). ‘Gearing up’ to improve interprofessional collaboration in primary care: A systematic review and conceptual framework. BMC Family Practice, 17.
This assessment will allow you to describe a plan proposal that includes an analysis of best practices of interprofessional collaboration, change theory, leadership strategies, and organizational resources with a financial budget that can be used to solve the problem identified through the interview you conducted in the prior assessment.
Having reviewed the information gleaned from your professional interview and identified the issue, you will determine and present an objective for an interdisciplinary intervention to address the issue.
Note: You will not be expected to implement the plan during this course. However, the plan should be evidence-based and realistic within the context of the issue and your interviewee’s organization.
Instructions
For this assessment, use the context of the organization where you conducted your interview to develop a viable plan for an interdisciplinary team to address the issue you identified. Define a specific patient or organizational outcome or objective based on the information gathered in your interview.
The goal of this assessment is to clearly lay out the improvement objective for your planned interdisciplinary intervention of the issue you identified. Additionally, be sure to further build on the leadership, change, and collaboration research you completed in the previous assessment. Look for specific, real-world ways in which those strategies and best practices could be applied to encourage buy-in
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