Overview of the Organizational Issue
According to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (2018), hospital-associated infections are one of the major causes of morbidity and mortality. In the organization in question, the medical staff is aware of the necessity of proper hand hygiene (HH), but the levels of their negligence and poor motivation are still high. Consequently, the identified problem refers to the inadequate involvement of the leadership, low hand hygiene compliance levels, and the treatment of increasing hospital-acquired infections.
Relevance of an Interdisciplinary Team Approach
As noticed by Victoria State Government (2021), “an interdisciplinary approach involves team members from different disciplines working collaboratively, with a common purpose, to set goals, make decisions and share resources and responsibilities” (para. 1). This approach is likely to be effective in addressing the identified issue because precisely the united efforts of various medical workers in the organization can lead to the desired improvement. This project will involve the organization’s doctors, nurses, managers, the cleaning staff, and other professionals who will consider each other’s skills, strengths, and weaknesses and help reach the objective.
Interdisciplinary Plan’s Objective
The specific aim of the interdisciplinary plan is to increase the level of compliance in the organization in question with the help of the introduced changes and innovations, as well as address the low motivation of the medical workers. It is of significant importance to achieve the objective because, as mentioned by Gould et al. (2017), inadequate hand hygiene leads to the spread of hospital-acquired infections. Overall, it is possible to suggest that the plan is likely to work and help the organization solve the issue because the plan is thought through and based on an interdisciplinary approach.
Interdisciplinary Team’s Efforts
In order for the plan to work, the organization’s medical workers will be divided into several interdisciplinary teams to concentrate their skills and efforts. In each team, the change manager will assign roles and control the members’ activities. The teams’ members will have to install hand disinfection stations and hand washing machines, prepare and post flyers and reminders in bathrooms and nurses’ rooms, and control whether they themselves and other workers follow the new guidelines (Gould et al., 2017). The interdisciplinary teams will complete several feedback forms and questionaries in order for managers to control the intermediate results and promptly adapt or change some measures if they appear to be ineffective.
Implementation and Resource Management
All plans aimed at achieving significant results require the proper allocation of human and financial resources and ensuring that they are not wasted. Therefore, it is essential to consider which resources are needed and how to justify their expenditure. Managers will need to divide the plan into several phases and allocate the selected resources, making sure that each step of the plan can incorporate what is needed. Further, documentation and reports should be prepared related to each human and financial resource, including the result it helped to achieve. Finally, questionaries and other evaluation methods will be used to assess the outcomes and find out whether the resources used contributed to the plan’s implementation.
Some real-world examples and recommendations from high-quality hospitals are likely to support the proposed plan and promote its effectiveness. For instance, Johns Hopkins Medicine’s allocation of human resources proves that the idea of some medical workers having the roles of observers is promising. Thus, at their hospitals, “some employees are trained to watch how well medical staff keep their hands clean;” “they observe doctors, nurses and other health care workers to see if they wash their hands or use antibacterial gel” (Johns Hopkins Medicine, n.d., para. 4).
Further, Saint Joseph Mercy Health System and Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center indicated how financial resources could be spent properly. Both hospitals purchased newer hand washing machines and “placed additional dispensers in the pilot areas to help ensure that placement matched workflow” (Health Research & Educational Trust, 2018, p. 8). Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center also decided to spend a part of its budget on purchasing a location system. Medical workers have to wear infrared recognition tags that are read by trackers on pumps, hand sanitizers, and sinks (Health Research & Educational Trust, 2018). All the mentioned interventions and allocated resources have contributed to increased hand hygiene.
Evaluation
Finally, it is required to discuss the plan’s success evaluation process. This project will use the same criteria that the hospitals mentioned in the study by Health Research & Educational Trust (2018) used. Thus, the first criterion is the general satisfaction of the medical employees: they will be offered to complete questionaries before, during, and after the implementation. The second criterion is the changing dynamics: the hospital will need to gather statistics on healthcare-associated infections before and after the project and compare the data. Finally, workers responsible for observing others will report how the levels of compliance increased. If these criteria have changed positively, the project will consider successful.
References
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. (2018). Healthcare-associated infections. Web.
Gould, D. J., Moralejo, D., Drey, N., Chudleigh, J. H., & Taljaard, M. (2017). Interventions to improve hand hygiene compliance in patient care. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 17(9). Web.
Health Research & Educational Trust. (2018). Hand hygiene project: Best practices from hospitals participating in the joint commission center for transforming healthcare project [PDF document]. Web.
Johns Hopkins Medicine. (n.d.). Hand hygiene. Web.
Victoria State Government. (2021). An interdisciplinary approach to caring. Web.