We are changing the setup at Ferndale Family Medical Center around a little. We started out with three implementation teams that would meet weekly.
- Planned Chronic Care (2)
- Patient Flow (1)
- Efficiency (4)
We created these teams as a result of the clinic goals:
- FFMC will provide needed health care to our patients when they want and need it.
- FFMC will provide pre-planned chronic illness care as a pro-active knowledgeable health care team interacting with our patients who are as active and informed managers of their chronic conditions as they desire to be.
- FFMC will be the workplace of choice for our physicians and staff because of our high satisfaction with work and our high patient satisfaction.
- FFMC will be a highly efficient office that does not waste the time and money of our staff and patients.
The efficiency team was tasked with finding some improvements in the general operations of the clinic. It was successful in doing this. But as the work continued, it was felt that the patient flow and efficiency teams had hindered forward motion because they were bumping into each other. The decision was made to put the two teams together. The Planned Chronic Care team seems to be moving merrily along, so it was left as is. Also, the communication across the teams was just not seemlying happening. At the second retreat, the FFMC team decided that two teams would meet every other week and on the alternate weeks, the staff would meet and be able to present team progress as well as all of those 'staff issues' that had fallen through the cracks with the creation of the original teams.
In keeping with our plan-do-study-act mentality, it appears that the second team was just too large to deal with. Space has also been an issue because there is no space really on site to meet. We had been meeting in restaurants.
So, the latest update on the team setup at Ferndale is as follows:
- Planned Chronic Care Team
- Patient Access Team and
- Patient wait times Team
We also agreed that there would be no more meetings in restaurants (whew, those are a killer to facilitate). They will all be held at the library in town where we have booked a meeting room.
The Patient Access Team met for the first time today. We discussed open access and are in a position to check and see how our supply and demand fit into this model. The team discussed how we would collect information on demand. We have a tally sheet that we will start to use Monday 03/10/03. As well, they are looking into any data that can be collected on panel size, no show rate, etc.
We have scheduled a visit from Catherine Tantau for March 27/28. The team is excited to be able to work with the data they have been collecting.
