Question

You are the department head of the Intensive Care Unit at UAB. You have been tasked to put together an internal team to address the following trend: patients’ overall satisfaction with the emotional support provided by nurses in your institution is lower than the satisfaction levels reported for other hospitals. Answer the following questions:

-What is the composition of your team by job title and why have they been chosen?

-How many team members will you have and why?

-What are the roles of each team member and what will their functions be? Some will just be team members without a formal role (these still need to be active participants).

Answer 1

When you are running an ICU, there is very little margin of error for mismanagement. Mostly a patient is moved in to an ICU when the physical condition of the patient is very critical thus team who is going to handle such case should be equipped with all the tools, machinery and most important knowledge to handle such cases effectively.

In order to create better performance of nursing staff following action should be taken,

a. Cultivate Emotional Intelligence among the nurses so that they have some empathy towards patient

b. Cultivate Psychological Safety among the nurses while interacting with patient

c. Enable the nurses to develop transactive memory

-What is the composition of your team by job title and why have they been chosen?

In general team size is dependent on size of ICU, how many beds in ICU, how many ventilators and other medical equipments

To discuss, let us assume that there are 20 beds in an ICU, thus following team size would be required to effectively run the ICU

Resident Doctor – 4 numbers (Morning shift), 2 numbers (Night shift)

Nurses – 20 numbers (Morning shift), 10 Numbers (Night shift)

Housekeeping – 2 numbers (Morning shift), 1 number (Night shift)

Biomedical engineer – 1 number (morning shift), 1 number (Night shift)

Visiting doctors – 2 times per day

-How many team members will you have and why?

As explained above with example,

To handle an ICU of 20 beds, I would require a team of 27 people (morning shift) and 14 people (night shift)

Resident Doctor – 4 numbers (Morning shift), 2 numbers (Night shift)

Nurses – 20 numbers (Morning shift), 10 Numbers (Night shift)

Housekeeping – 2 numbers (Morning shift), 1 number (Night shift)

Biomedical engineer – 1 number (morning shift), 1 number (Night shift)

Visiting doctors – 2 times per day

-What are the roles of each team member and what will their functions be? Some will just be team members without a formal role (these still need to be active participants).

As explained above, in any ICU there would be resident doctors, nursing staffs, support staff

Doctors – Resident doctor, Junior Doctor

Nursing Staff – Nurses

Support staff – Biomedical engineer, Housekeeping staff, Security guard

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