The emergency department is, by all means, frequently overwhelmed with the amount of workload per practitioner as well as the number of patients coming. For this reason, it is of paramount importance to make sure the productivity rates within the professional team are at their best. Hence, the first productivity improvement strategy would be the implementation of scribes regularly. The scribe’s primary task is to follow the attending physicians and note all the important information about the patient, allowing the attending to focus properly on the treatment interventions. The research shows that the introduction of scribes has positively affected the attending’s ability to see more patients and interact with them more efficiently (Ou et al., 2017).
Thus, deriving from this evidence, the next strategy for productivity improvement would be to eradicate multitasking as a means to increase efficiency. The more tasks a person has, the less likely they will be to perform them efficiently. Once multitasking is eliminated with the help of task automatization or hiring more personnel, the patient outcomes will improve in quality.
Another strategy relevant to the emergency department would be to eliminate wasted movement, which stands for the presence of possible obstructions in the patterns of employees’ movement around the department. The elimination of such obstacles will result in higher time efficiency for routine tasks (Almulhim et al., 2020). The fourth strategy would be to optimize the staff-teaming model, which stands for a set pattern of collaboration between nurses and physicians. Whether it is opting for a static or a dynamic patient assignment model, the pattern should work for a designated setting (Almulhim et al., 2020). Such an intervention will increase productivity by reducing time on assigning patients to the providers.
A similar strategy concerns the reduction of the access block to the emergency department by increasing patient flow. It means that allocating more people for an ED patient may result in his prompt discharge and availability for another patient to access a hospital bed (Elamir, 2018). Finally, it would be of paramount importance to promote team cooperation and interprofessional communication as a means of increasing the team’s morale. In such a way, providers will be more willing to refer to their colleagues to facilitate the treatment process.
References
Almulhim, K. N., Shesser, R., Pourmand, A., Whiteside, T., & Kane, E. (2020). The relationship between staff teaming models and emergency department efficiency. The American Journal of Emergency Medicine, 38(11), 2483-2486. Web.
Elamir, H. (2018). Improving patient flow through applying lean concepts to emergency department. Leadership in Health Services, 31(3), 293-309. Web.
Ou, E., Mulcare, M., Clark, S., & Sharma, R. (2017). Implementation of scribes in an academic emergency department: the resident perspective. Journal of Graduate Medical Education, 9(4), 518-522. Web.