The new report “213 Wisconsin Hospitals: Collaborative Partnership for Better Quality” www.wha.org/Data/Sites/1/pdf/WHA2014QualityReport.psf released March 24 by the Wisconsin Hospital Association (WHA) www.wha.org sees multidisciplinary teams as a way to ensure that patient care is accessible, affordable, and effective especially for chronic or complex diseases.
As discussed in the report, WHA launched their first “Transforming Care at the Bedside” (TCAB) cohort in 2011 and now hospitals are being added to the earlier cohorts. Today, TCAB has expanded beyond the typical medical surgical units to include emergency departments, obstetrical units, an oncology team, and a team from a long term acute care facility.
With TCAB, the emphasis is on learning what needs to be improved from the point-of-view of the staff. The program is teaching nursing leaders the skills they need to make a difference and then giving the staff the chance to try.
As a participant in the TCAB program, participants must collect data monthly, provide reports, and share the information with other hospitals. WHA’s role is to support teams by compiling, reporting data and facilitate team-to-team interactions monthly via webinars where teams report on some aspect of their TCAB work. Also, the WHA hosts the Quality Center website to serve as an information repository and data portal for WHA members to use to improve teams.
Hospitals are required to submit a log of their innovations and small tests of change. Each quarter, the nursing leadership at TCAB hospitals receive a progress report showing the level of their team’s engagement as well as their measureable improvement. TCAB hospitals learn to define very specific aims for improvement and then choose measures to track to continue to improve their outcomes.
Each TCAB team member receives a copy of the WHA Improvement Guide, a tool developed in the Partners for Patients Collaborative. The guide has step-by-step templates that hospitals can use to apply the Plan-Do-Study-Act Model for Improvement to any project.