Catheters Give Life but Sometimes Take It

Forming a Team

IHI leaders recommend a multidisciplinary, heterogeneous team-approach to patient care. They say the value of bringing diverse personnel together is that people from several levels (nurses, therapists, physicians) share a stake in the outcome. This can lead to greater camaraderie, and therefore, better communication and synergy.

Attracting and retaining an excellent team requires education, finding visible, credible champions within the facility, and recruiting people who want to be part of the project, not people who have to be forced.¹

“The team needs encouragement and commitment from an authority in the intensive care unit,” IHI leaders say. “Identifying a champion increases a team’s motivation to succeed. When measures are not improving fast enough, the champion readdresses the problems with staff and helps to keep everybody on track toward the aims and goals.”

Eventually, the program is established and becomes the norm, but that doesn’t mean the team members or patients are out of the woods yet.

“At some point ... changes in the field or other changes in the ICU will require revisiting the processes that have been developed,” IHI leaders continue. “Identifying a ‘process owner,’ a figure who is responsible for the functioning of the process now and in the future, helps to maintain the long-term integrity of the effort.”