Title : Supporting effective and efficient acute care consultations
Abstract:
Poor communication was shown to be a significant problem in 14%–24% of inpatient consultations. Poor communication increases cost to patients and financial burden on our health care system, ultimately resulting in poorer patient care and lower patient satisfaction. The proposed site of an evidenced-based quality improvement (EBQI) project has lacked a standard of care for consultation communication by nurse practitioners (NPs) who provide inpatient regional anesthesia consultations. Lack of a consultation framework had three adverse consequences: inefficiency in the service, diminished ability to effectively grow the consultation service and consultee dissatisfaction. To improve the efficiency of consultations provided by an acute NP consultation service, a toolkit was developed that included resources for both consultants (consultation providers) and consultees (consultation requesters). The focuses of this EBQI project were to (a) improve and maintain the efficiency of consultations provided by consultants and (b) evaluate consultants’ use of a checklist as an approach to guiding their consultation process.
A 15-minute web-based asynchronous education module was developed and presented that introduced the Willing CONSULT, an evidence-based framework for consultants, and a user checklist. Immediate-postintervention and 6-week- postintervention surveys assessed NPs’ knowledge and the intervention’s impact. Findings of this project will be discussed in this presentation.
Audience Take Away Notes:
- The Willing CONSULT framework can be implemented to all NPs on an inpatient team to enhance consultation communication and improve efficiency
- The educational intervention implementing the Willing CONSULT framework helped improve NPs’ knowledge about conducting effective consultations
