Does everyone in your office feel like they are "in the know"? Or do you hear complaints that "Communication is a real problem here"?
Do all the providers feel the staff are communicating among themselves, or do your physicians feel like they have to explain the same thing over and over and over to each nurse?
Are schedule changes shared across the team?
Are office meetings well attended, or is there always someone that "forgot" and missed the meeting?
Medical practices employ several techniques to communicate information to staff. Passive channels include posters (picture the sign on the refrigerator telling everyone when the fridge will be emptied and cleaned), email (the all-staff notice about a meeting date and time), the printed and distributed paper memo (the notice of a change in benefits), bulletin boards (the state-required worker compensation notice), the intranet (the office calendar of holidays/office closings), and the office meeting.
But isn't the office meeting an interactive channel, not a passive channel? Yes! How do you engage both physicians and staff during meetings to create an interactive learning environment where communication occurs?
Maybe what you call "the meeting" needs to change. People are more likely to participate in a "Hot Topics Q&A Session" than in an "Monthly Office Meeting." To improve communications, move away from a purely top-down approach to your group sessions. You can promote greater two-way feedback by reporting honestly and openly, and by actively responding to feedback appropriately.
Certainly we all have specific communication needs and often, those needs are best met with supplemental training sessions. All too often we confuse a meeting with a training agenda. "Bad communication" takes the blame for lack of training. Establish opportunities to enhance training by creating ongoing sessions and scheduling groups of employees for targeted attendance.
For example, a breakfast briefing for the physicians and nurses provides an opportunity to inform and train on a new process using the electronic health record. A once-a-month "Lunch and Learn" is another mechanism to improve communications by updating staff on new or revised procedures.
Many practices are using a daily huddle that brings together the physician, nurse, receptionist, and telephone scheduler to evaluate the upcoming day. The huddle is a 5-7 minute meeting -- held while standing -- to review which patients are scheduled and why the patients are being seen, to determine all data is available for the visit, to discuss unusual activities (facility or equipment issues, staff absences, etc.), and to plan for the unexpected (where to put add-on patients). The huddle gives the team one last chance to make sure everyone is "in the know" and to make any modifications that will improve the chance of a successful day for patients, providers, and staff.
The huddle is a great way for any team to start the day (or preview the upcoming day at the end of the current day). For example, if all the nurses in a pod or an office setting compared schedules and workloads, they could predetermine who would need extra support and how to provide that help. Without the huddle,
the nurses are all working as hard as they can, and work either gets left undone, or resentments start to build among the staff because work is unfairly distributed.
Engage your group, try a huddle, and help everyone work as a team, feeling they are informed and ready to tackle the next challenge of the day.