Getting started

This section provides guidance on building your case for improving multidisciplinary team performance. This includes, identifying the problem you aim to improve (not solution), backing up with local data and gaining health service support to establish your quality improvement team.

It is important to determine a realistic timeline prior to starting your improvement work. As a guide, it can take six to 18 months to initiate, test, implement and sustain an improvement.

This allows for time to complete the Discovery phase of Team Stripes which can take up to six weeks.

Note: The overall timeline may be shorter if previous improvement efforts have been made and may be longer if the change is complex and/or involves different services and departments.

What is the problem you want to solve relative to teamwork and communication?

The actual problem might not be easy to pinpoint, which is why you'll need to gather local data and conduct a literature review. It is important to focus on identifying the problem at this phase rather than fixing on a solution.

Examples of problems that you might want to improve include:

  • Patients and family members complain they are not included in decisions about their care
  • Care coordination is fragmented
  • The multidisciplinary team work in silos
  • Communication processes such as safety huddles and multidisciplinary team rounds are not valued or happen in an ad hoc way which means opportunities to mitigate risk are missed
  • There was a serious adverse event related to teamwork and communication.

When determining the focus of an improvement project, some common errors include:

  • Selecting a problem no one is interested in
  • Implementing a solution rather than investigating a problem
  • Focusing on a process that is currently in transition or unstable, for example, manual to electronic process
  • Selecting a problem that is beyond your capability to change or outside your sphere of influence.