I'd love some feedback of how other hospice teams fuction/survive their team meetings. We have struggled to reformat ours and are meeting much resistance. The form we use has been revised three times and still seems to be ineffective.

HELP!!!!

A Little background:

1. Our meetings have allowed 20 min per patient (thank goodness our census has never topped 20!)

2. Family and volunteers have always been invited, so we always have to wait to see if they show up.

3. The meetings were held q tues and thur of every week.

4. There is no gatekeeper, the clinical sup tries to keep meeting on track and record info at same time.

5. We have staff that like to ramble on about everything from where the cat likes to sleep to how many shingles are on the house........

If anyone has a form they'd like to share with me I'd be eternally grateful!!!!

Huby runs a hospice and he says the meeting patient care coordinator has to keep everyone on task and from rambling on or else their meeting would never end LOL.

They meet only once per week though.

renerian

Families invited? Holy cow. I don't think that would be necessary. Seems to me, if there needs to be a family conference, that could be set up separately. We usually have a time keeper, and try to keep it to 5 minutes per patient. Only the essentials need to be discussed, particularly, how do they continue to qualify for hospice. We discuss visit frequency, essential physical, psychosocial, and spiritual changes; goals and interventions that are supposed to be patient centered. In other words, what the patients goals are, not the teams. It is difficult to keep people on task, I or one of the other clinical coordinators try to be at the meeting. We meet weekly, discussing 1/2 the patients each week. Our usual census is around 70.

Hubby's conference always includes families only present for the part that discusses the client they are related to. That client would be done at the start of the meeting.

renerian

Jenny,

What are your goals for your meetings? It sounds like your staff have lost track of why they are there. In my past Hospice job we used that time to (quickly) bring other staff up to speed with a patient's status and/or family issues and to get support, if needed. We also had the Hospice medical director present and other staff present to troubleshoot problems with. 20 minutes is a LONG time. I might talk about where the cat slept if I had to speak about a patient that long! Obviously, there are always patients and families with multiple problems who require a lot of processing time but most don't.

At my agency it was supposedly not a venting session although sometimes it digressed to that. Our Pt care coordinator "ran" the meeting and kept everyone on track. She was good about redirecting staff who got off topic. You might consider assigning a facilitator.

We occasionally had a family attend but we required that they RSVP that they would be there and we talked about their family member first.

Good luck!