How do we ensure high value care for women, babies and children needing Social Work services in acute hospitals? The implementation of a Teams-based approach and a prioritisation tool for Social Work.
Jessica Maskell1, Sarah Rollins, Melissa Slipper , Angel Carrasco 1Gold Coast Health, Southport, QLD, Australia
Abstract
The Gold Coast has had significant population growth over the past 5 years. This amongst other factors has led to a substantial increase in demand for Social Work (SW) within Women, Newborn and Children services (WNCS) at Gold Coast Health (GCH). AS is commonly the case for SW in hospitals the model for delivering SW Services at GCH was from an individual perspective, allocating one SW to one clinical area. It became apparent at GCH that an individual practice approach was no longer manageable from a patient and workforce safety perspective.
There is limited literature to guide hospital SWs in prioritisation or teams-based approaches. Hence, a clinical redesign project was initiated to explore a more contemporary clinical and operational systems approach to better meet the WNCS patient demand that was of high value to patients and the healthcare system. This project sought to understand referral prioritisation decision making; to understand existing workload management practices and ultimately develop a teams-based approach with a shared model of prioritisation and workload management.
The outcomes were the development and implementation of a teams-based approach with a shared prioritisation tool across WNCS which has resulted in improvements in team cohesion and psychological safety within the team, a shared understanding of WNCS SW clinical priorities and improved consistency in responding to WNCS SW service demand. As hospitals become increasingly more focussed on demand and capacity, and decreasing workload variance, team-based approaches may provide a solution to meeting SW service demand, increasing efficiency, staff morale and teamwork.
Biography
Dr Jessica Maskell (BSW, B Pub Hlth, PhD) is the Assistant Director of Social Work at Gold Coast University Hospital. Dr Maskell has over 20 years’ clinical social work experience working in paediatric and adult services in public hospitals both in Australia and the United Kingdom and more than 7 years in Operational Management. She currently manages a large social work team at a tertiary level hospital where patient safety and quality as well as workforce management are priorities. She has over 10 peer-reviewed publications, has supervised PhD candidates and has presented at National and International conferences