How hospitalists work to pull healthcare teams together
Journal of Health Organization and Management
ISSN: 1477-7266
Article publication date: 16 November 2015
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to document everyday practices by which hospitalist physicians negotiate barriers to effective teamwork.
Design/methodology/approach
Ethnographic observation with a sample of hospitalists chosen to represent a range of hospital and practice types.
Findings
Hospitals rely on effective, interprofessional teamwork but typically do not support it. Hospitalist physicians must bridge the internal boundaries within their hospitals to coordinate their patients’ care, but they face challenges – scattered patients, fragmented information, uncoordinated teams, and unreliable processes – that can impact the timeliness and safety of care. Hospitalists largely rely on personal presence and memory to deal with these challenges. Some invent low-tech supports for teamwork, but these are typically neither tested nor shared with others. Formal support for teamwork, primarily case management rounds, is applied unevenly and may not be respected by all team members.
Research limitations/implications
The findings are drawn from observation over a limited period of time with a small, purposefully chosen sample of physicians and hospitals.
Practical implications
Hospitals must recognize the issues hospitalists and other providers face, evaluate and disseminate supports for teamwork, and make interprofessional teamwork a core feature of hospital design and evaluation.
Originality/value
The authors show the nuances of how hospitalists struggle to practice teamwork in a challenging context, and how the approaches they take (relying on memory and personal presence) do not address, and may actually contribute to, the system-level problems they face.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge the ABIM Foundation for their financial support of this project. The authors would also like to acknowledge the Society for Hospital Medicine for their help in identifying potential participants. Finally, the authors would like to offer our sincere gratitude to the hospitals where we conducted this research, and to all the healthcare providers and patients who graciously consented to being part of this research.
Citation
Chesluk, B., Bernabeo, E., Reddy, S., Lynn, L., Hess, B., Odhner, T. and Holmboe, E. (2015), "How hospitalists work to pull healthcare teams together", Journal of Health Organization and Management, Vol. 29 No. 7, pp. 933-947. https://doi.org/10.1108/JHOM-01-2015-0008
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2015, Emerald Group Publishing Limited