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Post Coverage at additional Hospital
Author: cblankenship
Date: Feb 19, 2009 6:06 pm
The organization I work for has a dedicated Palliative Medicine program with a palliative medicine team. Soon we will open another hospital in our health system. We will be providing palliative care to the patients in this new hospital but not another palliative medicine team. My question is; how have other multi-hospital systems covered palliative medicine needs at other hospitals in their systems with just one team?
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Re:Coverage at additional Hospital (by kkerr on 02/20/2009)
Congratulations on the new hospital. It’s great that palliative care will be available to patients at the new site right from day one. Expanding your service to cover a second hospital is an interesting challenge. Obviously, even if you still only operate one palliative care team that works at both sites you will need effort increases across all disciplines to cover the additional work. Given that need, I’m wondering if it might make sense to engage new people, at least in some disciplines, at the new site vs. increasing effort allocations for your existing team and expecting everyone to travel. It is not uncommon for a portion of a team (commonly a physician or NP) to work at one site in the morning and another site in the afternoon. In most such cases that I’ve heard about some core team members (RN or SW or spiritual care or all of these disciplines) do not travel from site to site. The advantage of this kind of set up is that even if some disciplines have somewhat limited availability (only physically on-site in the morning or afternoon), other providers will be more available, reducing the time that a patient might have to wait for the team to respond to a consultation request. You’ll want to think about how far apart the two hospitals are (exactly what are you looking at for travel time?), the expected workload at the new site, and if there are response time expectations for your service that might suffer if you start covering two hospitals (will referring providers be less satisfied if it takes you a lot longer to respond because all or some of your team is at a different site for a portion of the day?) Looking forward to hearing what others have to say on this. Regards, Kathleen Kerr, Senior Analyst, University of California San Francisco, Palliative Care Leadership Center

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