In your healthcare leadership role – whether as an owner or manager, you’ll have an acute awareness of how each role is integrated and that an efficient and coordinated team is integral to delivering the high standard of patient care you’re striving for. However, this awareness doesn’t necessarily exist across your team members focused on their specific roles, be they practitioners, nurses, allied health clinicians, or admin team members.
In this article, we’ve highlighted some ways you can help your different team members understand and appreciate one another’s roles and how they all fit together and subsequently enhance collaboration. While it would be unrealistic to expect them to understand every aspect of one another’s roles, increasing their understanding will help them support each other, drive efficiency and help improve the culture overall in your practice.
The Patient/Client Journey
A great place to start helping your team see how they all fit together is to reflect on the journey your patients or clients have with your practice. This begins with their first contact – phone/in-person/online, through to post-consultation calls with results and review appointments. Doing this review at a team meeting and getting team members to role-play/show the steps they go through can be a fun and enlightening exercise for the whole team!!
If you’d like to delve deeper into the patient journey, how it all comes together in your practice and how you can optimise it for your patients, you might want to review our articles – “Optimising the Patient Journey” Part One and Part Two.
Patient Care
A benefit of working with a healthcare team is that despite their different roles, all your team members have something in common – a passion for helping people and providing quality patient care. Helping team members see how each role contributes to this outcome is key. Some suggestions are:
Regular whole-team meetings, potentially over lunch/snacks, and discussions about plans, changes, challenges, and wins.
Interviewing team members about the specifics of their roles to be shared in an internal newsletter for your team. Maybe, “A day in the life of ____”?
Gaining regular feedback from each team member about the challenging aspects of their role and working with other relevant team members to generate solutions.
Including questions in performance reviews/meetings about what is getting in people’s way of doing a good job – equipment, processes, etc. and getting their suggested solutions.
Include an overview of each role in your induction/practice manual for new team members to refer to, and ensure they all read and discuss it – clinical and admin!
Ongoing Training
A common pain point in many healthcare practices is gaining comprehensive knowledge of the clinical software and optimising its use while performing a busy role. Of course, different roles in your practice will use specific functionality more than others. Still, it’s common for people within roles not to know all the functionality available to them or the program’s full capabilities. Whether they’ll use the functions on a day-to-day basis, it can be helpful for each team member to understand the broader functionality available. They can ask questions later to jog their memory of the details if they know they exist.
Such broader knowledge of the program can also promote understanding and appreciation of one another’s roles and enable you to work together more effectively. For example, when clinicians understand that providing the admin team with the billing and review appointment information before the patient leaves the consulting room means faster processing at the front desk (and fewer phone calls to them!), they’re more likely to prioritise putting the information through. And when the admin team sees things like the steps a clinician goes through when writing a repeat script, including reviewing the patient’s file and the challenges of juggling path requests, plain paper and scripts through the printer trays…, they understand why a ‘quick script request’ often isn’t a quick process!
A broader understanding of the software also comes in handy when approaching a problem or error. It can increase the capacity of team members to problem solve on their own/with one another, decreasing the need for practice managers to problem solve (as frequently).
Some training possibilities, including on your software, are:
Covering some software functionality in your professional development or team meetings. This can be particularly useful when an update with new functionality has been released. You may include case studies or role-playing to provide context on when to use them.
A dedicated information session to show how different team members use the software – this is where the Patient Journey perspective can help! As well as learning new tips and tricks about the software, your team members will better understand how/when each receives communications, where these land, what they look like and the details needed to make their job easier.
A goals and values session, at which each team member talks about how they live and breathe the values in their day-to-day role. These provide invaluable insights into one another’s roles!
Team building sessions – perhaps doing an activity or learning a new skill together. One of our clients recently had their whole team learn how to make knives – a new experience that put everyone on the same footing 😊.
Establishing Expectations
As a leader of your team, you have the opportunity to establish the expectations of each team member. This can start right from the first discussion or interview, as you establish whether you and they are the right fit. Once you agree they’re coming on board, your induction processes will underpin consistency. Many practices have a comprehensive induction process for admin team members, but new clinical staff can fly under the radar. If you don’t have one, you might like to review our ”Effectively Onboarding and Promoting Your New Clinician” article.
Another important consideration as a healthcare leader/manager is training your team to recognise that we all have stressful days. It can be difficult for them always to feel empathy, but it can be helpful to point out that a team member’s unusual behaviour might be explained by stress. Of course, sometimes the behaviour needs to be addressed, but approaching one another with compassion will help – often, we don’t know the details of what’s happening in one another’s lives at and outside of work.
At the end of the day, when your team understands they’re all working toward the common goals of helping people and providing excellent care, you’ll be able to use this to improve feelings of belonging and cohesion at work 😊
The Augmentum team provides a broad range of consultancy and management services, supporting healthcare business owners and decision-makers in key areas such as strategy development and action planning, building effective foundations and teams, keeping your finger on the pulse, and driving growth and success.
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