Caregivers are the heart and soul of any healthcare facility — so enabling them to do their jobs to the best of their ability should be the first priority of facility managers and executives. Learn how automated technology can be used to support them in this article.
Keeping day-to-day hospital operations running while still maintaining the highest quality of patient care is no easy feat. While the health care team on the front lines is working tirelessly to deliver quality patient care, hospital facility managers on the backend are working to ensure the hospital is running like a well-oiled machine. Hospital management teams should prioritize providing clinicians with technology that alleviates the obstacles often associated with staff scheduling, medication delivery and operations.
Here are some of the top considerations healthcare managers should make to ensure the hospital is running smoothly so doctors and nurses can remain focused on patient care.
Put Your Caregiving Staff First
The best facility managers are leaders who relieve staff from everyday tasks such as: operational planning, department organization and managing interactions between caregivers and executives. By engaging physicians to help with the decision-making process, hospitals see increased productivity. Facility managers must be the eyes and ears of clinicians, bringing problems and solutions to executive leadership.
The hospital facilities team is “on” 24/7 and must always be available at a moment’s notice. The facilities manager must be ready to step in to have crucial conversations with senior leadership that help provide staff with essential technologies and solutions that can help improve patient care and alleviate stress in staff.
Improving Outcomes & Supporting Staff
Improving patient outcomes and experiences, as well as reducing costs are all on the forefront of executive leadership’s minds. So how do you create a balance between striving for improvement and cost reductions and still support your clinicians?
Facility managers must build trust with physicians and nurses so that they feel they are treated fairly and listened to when problems with productivity and staffing issues arise.
How Hospital Facility Teams Can Support Clinicians
Clinician shortages, demanding work schedules and appointment delays are all major issues that crop up within the hospital walls. To mitigate physician burnout, the facilities management team must step in to ensure that technological solutions are implemented to ensure physicians can do more with less.
Here’s are a few things to keep in mind when considering facility changes that will impact the day-to-day work of caregivers and clinicians:
Improved Efficiencies and Staff Success
Allow clinical staff and caregivers to review improvement ideas and test out the systems of change — after all, they will be the ones using this. Showing your staff that they fit into the process proves that they are valued by the organization and will help to increase engagement and support.
Implementing solutions that can help save time and decision making will make physicians feel empowered and improve patient care. Avoiding the red tape and solutions that help ease documentation can increase time with the patient and avoid physician fatigue. For example, a modern synchronized clock system ensures on-time patient care and medication delivery, ensure shift changes occur on time and reduce time spent manually logging hours, improving staff success.
Communicate Often and Candidly
Addressing your staff’s concern is an important way to keep your hospital up and running. The communication lines must remain open and facility managers must actively listen and propose solutions that will help healthcare providers focus on patient care. Managers should work to overcome barriers that may impede clinicians from caring for patients.
Provide Support and Education
Physicians may often refrain from telling senior leadership what they need due to doubts of commitment and support from executives and lack or resources. It will be important for clinicians to know that their suggestions and input do not fall on deaf ears. Facility managers must collaborate with clinicians and executive leadership to ensure the best possible resources are provided to staff.
Finding Solutions to Problems
Facility managers must put the right tools in the hands of the front-line caregivers. To do so it will be imperative to identify a support structure and resources so that healthcare providers can do their jobs without worrying about the red tape. Infrastructure change are difficult and takes many conversations, meetings and discussions to implement. While the providers should be involved in the solutions for change, the facility manager should ensure that time is not taken away from the patient. Facility managers should reduce the roadblocks that lead to real change and ensure that caregivers focus on their main priority.
How Primex Can Help
The Primex OneVue system provides a holistic solution to help connect staff with real-time data, provide critical notifications in emergencies, reduce manual logging and increase compliance.
The OneVue Sync solution can increase staff efficiency by keeping the entire facility running on the exact same time, easing documentation challenges with billing and insurance disputes. The OneVue Sense environmental monitors help to protect sensitive materials and prevent the loss of clinical resources. The OneVue Notify InfoBoard system allows hospitals to alert staff and patients to critical situations in seconds with unique visual messaging.OneVue Monitor seamlessly connects them all, aggregating data on coded events, environmental changes, and more for the caregiving staff to access anywhere, anytime.
For additional information about how you can implement the OneVue System at your facility, visit https://www.primexinc.com/healthcare.
References
https://www.healthcatalyst.com/the-best-way-hospitals-engage-physicians-nurses-and-staff
https://www.mazzetti.com/healthcare-facility-director-role-critical-staff/
https://facilityexecutive.com/2016/11/facility-design-to-support-clinicians/