The Center for Interprofessional Education presented at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) Forum on a partnership with the Michigan Medicine Office of Patient Experience and the Wellness Office.
The Michigan Center for Interprofessional Education (C-IPE) is dedicated to working with health systems and community settings to improve teamwork and as a result, improve people’s health and the well-being of those on the team.
C-IPE recently partnered with Michigan Medicine’s Office of Patient Experience and the Wellness Office to present at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement Forum on their work in this area.
The team performed analyses on 22 ambulatory care units representing a diversity of locations, specialties and team size. They used staff data from the annual employee engagement survey, which contained questions related to teamwork and well-being. Teamwork questions contained two scales: a “Team Index” focused on detailed intra-team dynamics, and a “Team Theme” focused on broader intra-team collaboration. The well-being questions covered six domains: work-home flexibility, psychological safety, professional fulfillment, feeling valued, leadership connection and burnout.
The group found that the six well-being domains were all significantly associated with both the Team Index and the Team Theme question sets. After further analysis, they found that psychological safety and work-home flexibility were the independent variables which explained 78-79% of the variation in Team Index.
Contrary to the hypothesis and national data, the overall teamwork score and the individual Team scores each demonstrated weak association with overall patient experience and patient perception of teamwork.
Next steps will be to convene a thinking group among several U-M and Michigan Medicine offices to explore ways to improve psychological safety, as well as to explore further the patient’s perspective of teamwork.