 Improving clinical care for CKD patients
Cecilia Li and her colleagues at the chronic kidney disease (CKD) clinic at Vancouver General Hospital (VGH) are on a mission. Through basic changes to the way they operate, the team expects to significantly increase their productivity and the quality of care they provide for patients at the clinic.
Cecilia says when she joined the VGH renal program as patient services manager in spring 2007, people from the program told her they needed more resources. But before asking for more, says Cecilia, "I thought we should first look at how our current resources were being used, to make sure we were operating as efficiently as possible."
That started the ball rolling on a series of process improvement efforts, including group teaching sessions and case management by interdisciplinary teams rather than on a one-to-one basis. To improve patient education, all of the clinic’s educational materials were reviewed and revisions made to better address the learning needs of patients.
"Because 25 percent of our patients don’t speak English, language is one of our biggest challenges for education," says Cecilia. "We also have a lot of older patients who have problems with hearing and eyesight."
To address these challenges, Cecilia says clinic staff are looking at a variety of changes to how they provide patient education, from language translations of written and video-based materials, to finding ways of "marketing hope" to patients who come to the clinic feeling depressed about their CKD.
The clinic is currently trying out a new process for clinic visits, involving an interdisciplinary team of renal professionals, including a nephrologist. With key support through PROMIS, the team thinks it could double the number of patients seen in each clinic visit.
Although this initiative is still in trial mode, Cecilia has pegged April 1, 2009 as the "go-live" date for these sessions to become standard for all patients. In the future, she sees an opportunity for even greater efficiency by combining group visits with clinical visits for CKD patients at the VGH clinic.
Many of the operational changes underway at the VGH clinic borrow from the success of similar initiatives at other CKD clinics around the province. Taken together, the changes at VGH represent a significant shift in how its CKD clinic deals with patients. And as various process improvements are implemented, Cecilia and her colleagues are diligently tracking results. Cecilia says patient feedback to date has been largely positive, and by next year she hopes to have evaluation results worthy of publication and sharing with renal network colleagues from across the province at BC Nephrology Days.
<< Return to the full newsletter
|
