The EEICC Project: Enhancing the Effectiveness of Interprofessional Team Working
Project Summary
Aim
This project aims to implement and evaluate the cost and clinical impact in community-based older people´s services of an Interprofessional Management Tool (IMT) designed to optimise team working.
Background
Data from SDO funded projects (SDO/95/2005 & SDO/214/2008) and published literature has been used to develop an Interprofessional Management Tool (IMT) designed to optimise interprofessional team working in community based older peoples' services. It is concerned with the way that different types of staff work together to share expertise, knowledge and skills to impact on patient care. Despite increasing emphasis on interprofessional working there is little evidence available on the most effective way of developing, organising and managing these teams.
Objectives
The project will develop a model which describes the relationship between different approaches to interprofessional working and outcomes, specifically;
(a) Patient outcomes (e.g. quality of life, satisfaction with care, therapy outcomes);
(b) Staff outcomes (e.g. satisfaction, retention, autonomy, career development opportunities);
(c) Costs of service delivery;
(d) Duration of care.
Implementation
The IMT will be implemented over a six month period beginning with a semi−structured, one day Service Evaluation Conference (SEC) in which teams reflectively evaluate their practice within the framework of the IMT. This is followed by 3 half-day Team Learning Sets (TLSs). We are capturing the change process systematically at each session and evaluating the effectiveness of the sessions.