Interactive Session 3 – Developing and implementing clinical pathways

Linked to EAHP Statements:
Section 5: Patient Safety and Quality Assurance

ACPE UAN: 0475-0000-16-023-L04-P. An application based activity.

Abstract

For years, several approaches have been undertaken to improve global safety of patient and efficiency of patient care. Many reports and papers evidenced that most of the projects were run through improvement of functional activities, leading to a Silo-kind organization. Silo organizations enable great quality in high-skilled activities, while providing a comfortable environment for experts. However, Silo organisations have poor efficiency, since coordination is made difficult. As a result, no global optimisation of resources and patient time is achieved, which also increases global costs.

The patient clinical pathway (CP) is a quality tool that reconciles experts with activity planning and process efficiency, for the benefit of patients, by providing transversality to the organisation and making experts working hand in hand. The CP is a process-oriented management approach. It has 3 major steps: designing the patient pathway (i.e. defining all the activities, the stakeholders, the materials, the duration times); planning the activities to optimise critical resources; and monitoring the activities day-to-day.

This is a very attractive method to develop collaborative practice and prevent any “isolated” activity improvement by a given stakeholder.

This workshop will present this tool, how to implement it and how to rely on it to improve medication use process.

Teaching goals:

• To present the importance of designing the clinical pathway;
• To describe how to build together the clinical pathway;
• To demonstrate the evidence of clinical pathway for management of patient safety.