Thursday 14 July 2022
With our Accreditation assessment 31 days away, now is the time to ensure you feel confident and comfortable showcasing the great work you do to deliver high-quality, comprehensive care and positive patient experiences.
Assessors won’t be trying to test or trick you, but they will be interested in, and may ask you:
“Can you show me how you deliver comprehensive care?”
For most of us, working together to plan, manage and coordinate care for our patients is second nature and something we do each and every day. But how would you describe and demonstrate it to assessors?
In this edition of the Accreditation Bulletin, we take a closer look at comprehensive care: what it is, and the tools, techniques, and work practices we use to support it.
Key messages
Understanding comprehensive care
Simply put, comprehensive care involves teams of health care professionals working together with patients to effectively plan, manage, and coordinate care from admission to discharge.
It’s about partnering with the patient, their carers, and families to identify their individual needs, keep them safe and provide the best possible care while they are with us.
Comprehensive care involves:
- Identifying and documenting your patient’s goals of care
- Assessing your patient and completing their risk assessments
- Developing and reviewing your patient’s comprehensive care plan
- Delivering clinically appropriate, coordinated care for your patient
- Communicating openly and effectively with your patient and colleagues
The EMR and comprehensive care
The EMR is the tool we use for communicating and documenting the care we provide to our patients. It gives team members and other clinicians associated with your patients’ care the complete picture across the patient journey.
The EMR provides interactive views and workflows that allow us to view and share the same patient information, across professions, in real-time.
Our Chief Medical Information Officer and Program Director, EMR & Informatics, Associate Professor Michael Franco, has an excellent analogy for this:
“Think of the EMR as a house that stores all patient information inside it. Each clinical group looks into the house through different windows, but we’re always looking into the same house, at the same time.”
When it comes to facilitating and demonstrating comprehensive care, interactive views in the EMR, called Millennium-Pages (M-Pages), are not only easy to access but have been specifically designed to suit the workflows of our clinical teams.
Read more about making the most of M-Pages, including screenshots of patient-specific and multi-patient views in the EMR for our clinical groups.
One-page ‘EMR and comprehensive care’ quick reference guides
To ensure you feel confident and comfortable discussing and demonstrating how the EMR facilitates comprehensive care, we’ve created simple, one-page Quick Reference Guides (QRGs) for our medical, nursing and midwifery, pharmacy, allied health, and administrative employees.
Download the QRG for your area/speciality, print them out, discuss them with your teams and put them on your employee noticeboards.
Showcasing the EMR
Remember, assessors are not there to test or trick you. They want to know how you provide patients with safe, appropriate, and effective care.
If the assessors ask or show interest, involve them in your huddles and run them through the EMR workflows you’re using to deliver comprehensive care for your patients.
Don’t forget to showcase the EMR to our patients as well. Include your patients when and where possible, just remember not to position your Workstation on Wheels (WOWs) between yourself and your patient.
The hybrid model and comprehensive care
Some of our teams use a hybrid model of EMR and paper workflows, including oncology, anaesthesia, maternity, and mental health.
If your team uses a hybrid model, showcase this to the assessors and talk about the systems you use, the processes you have in place and how they all work together to deliver patient-centred care and facilitate safe and informed decision-making.
To ensure you feel confident and comfortable conveying your great work, we’ve put together some hybrid model resources for you on the Accreditation website.
Learn more about comprehensive care
Links and factsheets
The Comprehensive Care Standard is one of the eight national standards our assessors will review during our accreditation survey in August (Monday 15 – Friday 19).
You can find more information about Comprehensive Care and the eight national standards, including links and factsheets, on the National Standards page of our employee Accreditation website.
Upcoming events/forums
On Tuesday 19 July, join our Employee Forum and hear from Chief Medical Information Officer and Program Director of EMR and Informatics, Associate Professor Michael Franco, who will give a presentation and show us how the EMR can assist with providing coordinated and comprehensive patient care.
All managers are requested to share these updates with their teams and discuss them at meetings and handovers. Please print a copy and display it in communication books and on employee noticeboards. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us.
For Accreditation information and resources, please visit the Monash Health employee Accreditation website.