Guide to Patient and Family Engagement: Environmental Scan Report
This project promotes patient and family engagement in hospital settings by developing, implementing, and evaluating the Guide to Patient and Family Engagement: Enhancing the Quality and Safety of Hospital Care (hereafter referred to as the Guide). The Guide includes tools, materials, and/or training for patients, family members, health professionals (e.g., hospital clinicians, staff), hospital leaders, and those who will implement the materials in the Guide.
A Toolkit for Redesign in Health Care: Final Report
In October 2003, Denver Health began a major effort to redesign/transform the process of care in the hospital in a comprehensive manner. This project was supported by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
This document presents the following information:
A National Agenda for Research in Collaborative Care
This collection of three research papers represents the fruits of the AHRQ-funded Collaborative Care Research Network Research Development Conference in Denver in October 2009. At the meeting, participants took steps toward establishing a research agenda for collaborative care among primary care and mental health clinicians.
The three papers are:
Collaboration between nurses and physicians
Collaboration between nurses and physicians has emerged as a result of recent research as a key variable in explaining patient outcomes from intensive care. However, the term has lacked a generally accepted definition, and this creates problems for new research. The use of the term in studies related to collaborative practice is reviewed here. Content areas for an instrument that could be used to examine collaborative work are suggested.
Who is attending? End-of-life decision making in the intensive care unit
PURPOSE: Traditional expectations of the single attending physician who manages a patient's care do not apply in today's intensive care units (ICUs). Although many physicians and other professionals have adapted to the complexity of multiple attendings, ICU patients and families often expect the traditional, single physician model, particularly at the time of end-of-life decision making (EOLDM). Our purpose was to examine the role of ICU attending physicians in different types of ICUs and the consequences of that role for clinicians, patients, and families in the context of EOLDM.
“The problem often is that we do not have a family spokesperson but a spokesgroup”: Family Member Informal Roles in End-of-Life Decision-Making in Adult ICUs
Background: To support the process of effective family decision-making, it is important to recognize and understand informal roles various family members may play in the end-of-life decision-making process.
Objective: The purpose of this study was to describe some informal roles consistently enacted by family members involved in the process of end-of-life decision-making in intensive care units (ICUs).
Intensive Care Unit Cultures and End-of-Life Decision Making
Purpose: Prior researchers studying end-of-life decision making (EOLDM) in intensive care units (ICUs) often have collected data retrospectively and aggregated data across units. There has been little research, however, about how cultures differ among ICUs. This research was designed to study limitation of treatment decision making in real time, to evaluate similarities and differences in the cultural contexts of four ICUs and the relationship of those contexts to EOLDM.
Nurse-physician collaboration in intensive care units
In this editorial, the author describes and evaluates an intervention study by Drs. Hamric and Blackhall. Particularly significant is the determination of positive relationships between collaboration and a) satisfaction with quality of care and b) ethical climate for two groups of nurses and the single group of physicians studied. Collaboration also was related inversely to moral distress.
Overview: Partnerships and collaboration: What skills are needed?
The author gives an overview of a special issue of The Online Journal of Issues in Nursing, highlighting several themes: At the beginning is interdisciplinary education, with nascent providers of various professions learning together both about substance and about the perspectives of each other’s professions. In the process of professional work, there is the need to consider multiple perspectives and to communicate thoughtfully, not only in traditional teams, during interdisciplinary rounds, and in telephone communications but using new forms of technology.
The dying patient in the ICU: Role of the interdisciplinary team
Expert opinion supports the application of broad interdisciplinary team approaches to the care of the dying patient in the intensive care unit (ICU). Current literature contains many suggestions about how core team members-physicians, nurses, and patients/family members-could systematically enhance interdisciplinary collaboration in the care of the dying patient. In the few studies of ICU interdisciplinary collaborative care of the dying patient, investigator shave demonstrated improvement in care.