Treatment Team & Treatment (Care) Plans in Psychiatric Nursing

[sunxfire, DNP]

For those of you who deal with the annual/bi-annual burden of the evil JCAHO, how do you go about doing Treatment Plans with your treatment team (psychiatrist, social worker, nurse, recreational therapist, etc.) on your inpatient unit so they meet the JCAHO requirements?

I currently work on an inpatient psychiatric unit (located within a hospital) and the treatment team process/updating treatment plans has been a big and time consuming issue. While we have transitioned to EPIC (approx. 1.5 years ago) we still do the treatment plans on paper, as the "system" is moving at a glacial pace in incorporating care plans into the EPIC CIS software. I have reviewed the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services guidelines on treatment plans and they are rather vague and did not provide any answers on how to better organize this process so it is more streamlined.

Any input on how your facility updates and completes (handwritten/paper) treatment plans would be helpful!

Thank you in advance =T

[ProfRN15]

I, too,  work on an inpatient psychiatric unit within a larger hospital and we have Cerner EHR. We do PAPER treatment plans with social workers and occupational therapists able to be part of our multidisciplinary treatment plan on day 2. I HATE IT! I have pushed my manager to go digital and we have explored that, but so far it's still paper. I am sort of relieved that I'm not the only one working for a hospital that is sort of backwards, but I'd love to find better answers. We still handwrite out the SAME nursing interventions per patient per treatment plan. It is a colossal waste of time when we have digital options available.