Halloween is done. Conference 2018 is done. It’s time to get back to demonstrating the value of the work primary care teams do every day! Based on member input, AFHTO’s board chose ‘follow-up after hospitalization” as a priority for improvement across the membership for the coming year. This bulletin highlights activities that might help in that regard. Focus on Follow-Up in the North East: Scared of having your patients fall through the cracks? Join us in Sudbury on November 27th for a full-day, interprofessional workshop for teams (and hospital partners) in the North East LHIN.
- Focus on Follow-Up will help your team make concrete progress in three areas: getting hospitalization information, tracking follow-up in EMRs, and doing the follow-up in a patient-centered way.
- As always, we’ll be highlighting the wisdom of the field, so you’ll hear what’s already working for your peers in the North East, and how you can do it in your team.
- Learn more, or go straight to registration!
Patient Oriented Discharge Summaries (PODS): It’s been a year! It’s time to check in about how well they’re working and why. The PODS research team is sponsoring the upcoming Focus on Follow-up session for AFHTO members (see above). Please help thank them by giving them 3 minutes of your time to complete a post-implementation survey of primary care teams. Sound familiar, but you’re not quite sure? Read on …
- The questionnaire asks whether you’re sharing PODS with patients who go into hospital and/or getting them from patients when they come out of hospital. It also asks whether your team finds PODS helpful when it comes to doing follow-up.
- PODS, introduced in 2017, are a tool that can help your patients get the information they need when they leave hospital. Twenty-seven hospitals across Ontario are giving PODS to patients at discharge.
- Think you’ve seen this survey before? You may have done the original, baseline survey when PODS were first implemented. That survey helped the research team understand the potential value of PODS for primary care. This follow-up survey (see what we did there?) will help the measure the outcome of the intervention.
Use your Schedule A to help track progress with follow-up (among other things): Follow the North Star to make your Schedule A more useful tool. Or consider reviewing the Program Performance Measures Catalogue (PPMC) to find more meaningful and consistent measures for your Schedule A. More consistency shows measurement maturity, further demonstrating the value of teams to the MOHLTC. If you’re not ready to redesign your Schedule A yet, maybe you would consider at least sharing the current version of your Schedule A. This will help us update the catalogue and make it more useful.
- More information on PPMC: Here’s an introduction to the tool and how other teams are using it. And check out the quick reference guide for a cheat-sheet that will help you navigate it. You may also want to consider using program-planning and evaluation tools developed with and for AFHTO members.
Congratulations to everyone who presented at the AFHTO 2018 conference! We’re especially proud to toot the horn of our QI professionals – QIDS Specialists, QIIMS, and other QIDSS-like folks, now collectively known as the Q. Missed their presentations? Check out the links below. You may want to borrow some of their ideas for your own measurement and quality improvement work.
- Improving Quality Together
- Stop banging your head against a wall: how to measure, discuss, and improve timely access to team-based primary care
- Team-Based Transition Management – A Hospital Discharge Follow-Up Process
- The North Star – Leading the Way in Collective Action
- Thinking outside the box: Applying Lean tools in primary care
- When Things Aren’t Adding Up, Start Subtracting! De-Prescribing Sedative-Hypnotics
- Working together: A multi-organizational partnership to support pain management and opioid prescribing in primary care teams
For these slides and more, visit our website here.
In Case You Missed It: Check out eBulletin #80 or other back issues here!
Questions? Comments? Connect with the QIDS team at improve@afhto.ca.