Working together is one of, if not the most important factor to help someone or something rise to their true potential. No matter where you live, who you are, your age, or what your vision is, most of the time you will flourish majorly by asking and implementing the help of experts.
Only through teamwork and collaboration, it is possible to become a better human being. When you have people there that can see things from different perspectives, you can find and solve problems that you didn’t see or solve before.
This is what makes you grow as a person. With this idea in mind, it is more than natural to want to work together in a team when it comes to the care of the patient.
Very often, when we mention patient treatment we tend to think that only people involved in physical therapy or occupational therapy are the pathologists of speech-language and that they are the only ones specialized in healthcare.
We think that these are the only professionals that can help patients with their care plans, but that is wrong on every level.
Therapists are occasionally part of bigger interdisciplinary teams that are made of different people and professionals that work together with the same purpose in mind and that’s the optimal patient outcome.
Many people wonder what is the best way to improve the experience of the patient, increase the volume of patients and simply level up the operations of the clinic as a whole team.
You see, the secret is in the word team, meaning that you need to adopt a team treatment system in your own self in order to achieve this goal.
An overall explanation of the team treatment system?
Now, what is the “team treatment system” you might ask? It is the same thing you think of when you hear it, which means it is basically work done by a group of people who come together as a team in an effort to treat another person. This team must include everyone from the secondary positions such as the therapist assistant to the therapist him or herself.
Every single person on this therapy team must provide some kind of value and help the process through their specialized skills. For example:
One secret to this kind of team treatment collaboration is communication, and this is especially important when it comes to patients.
You see, you may not be familiar with this but patients should have the right to know every single person of the staff that is going to assist them.
This should happen before even starting their treatment because this is going to help them comprehend that their wellbeing is going to be treated by a team of dedicated people who all come to work together for the patient’s sake.
Only by working in this kind of way, are we able to build a patient-clinic relationship from the very start.
Only by working as a professionally honest team are we able to help the various practices of a clinic and come to realize the power of team treatment philosophy.
Patients, or some of the providers as well for all that matters, often think that it is better for patients to receive a one-person treatment with a personal caretaker, yet this is not necessarily true.
You see, a team treatment is better because the way that many people can approach a problem is always different, thus tending to solve it better.
In practice, it is better when the care team staff gets introduced to the patient before the evaluation.
Once the patient gets to know the care team members and who is responsible for what and the work starts flowing every day, despite the type of the visit, whether it is for a regular progress check-up or manual therapy, the patient will feel in secure hands. This is what most people fail to understand. Patients tend to be more satisfied with a team of experts taking care of them.
It might happen very rarely that a patient can ask for a specific caretaker to do the manual therapy with the patient for example.
Only good individual players can create a great team.
The team will only be able to deliver a good quality service if the players are able to hold the same standards when they are on their own. That is the only way that the team treatment philosophy is going to work out.
If one of the team members is weak individually then he or she will not be able to provide the same quality of precaution and care when they will all work with each other as a team and this might disrupt the whole process.
All of this can decrease the whole quality of the service that you are trying to provide, especially if you decide to not use PTAs or ATCs but instead you choose to use techs that are not so specialized.
If this is how you are working at the moment, then the only way that this is going to work out is if the aid is being highly supervised by a very competent expert.
On the other hand, when the team members know each other and most importantly when they know each other’s skills, this can give them the confidence to rely on the team. An expert caretaker can be sure that if they are absent one day, the rest of the team will do a fantastic job.
At the point when you choose to at long last embrace a group treatment style and influence this way of thinking to its maximum capacity, you have the potential for expanding your facility's patient volume.
Presently, to do this, we would suggest separating errands and filling everybody's timetables with duties explicit to their capacities. PTs can chip away at finishing more assessments in seven days while PTAs and ATCs complete different exercises with patients.
You could likewise task PTAs to lead the charge when seeing returning patients for follow-up arrangements. This is just going to improve the group's usefulness without over-burdening anybody.
Well, most of this depends on your state’s supervision rules. You see, PTs could even work on other non-clinical but no less important tasks, like marketing or business management.
From this point of view, PTs can develop strategies that drive patient volume, enhance patient retention, and maximize patient reactivation rates. Each of these tasks is super important to maintain a healthy bottom line.
On the other hand, you can use other selected staff members like ATCs to external locations to help bring in patients via new referral channels.
ATCs can work in schools or other providers in order to create that other revenue for referrals. For example, if student-athletes have a relationship and rapport with an ATC, those athletes are more likely to seek external care from them. In other words, they may seek out your clinic specifically.
This strengthens those patients’ continuity of care. Because the trust flows from the training room to the PT clinic. This will help you develop a stronger relationship with the team doctor along the way.
Source: Freepik
Look, when you are working individually it is almost impossible to get sick and forget about vacation.
You simply cannot afford to disrupt a patient's treatment. That is where the team comes into play. Having a team treatment will make things so much easier for everybody, especially for the patient.
If a therapist, assistant, or extender calls out sick or goes on vacation, the patient won’t necessarily have to work with someone who’s totally unfamiliar with their care plan.
They will have at least one familiar face to connect with and that familiar face can communicate the patients’ progress and preferences to whoever else they may need to work with that day.
It happens more than often for some patients to even postpone their care when their favorite clinician is out of the office. That is why a team-based approach may even prevent patients from taking a break during the middle of their care plan.
Source: Freepik
Teamwork, makes dreams work. A one-man caretaker has to be diligent during the whole time. We all are familiar with the stressful lives of a single working therapist.
You either have to reject new clients when you are super full of work or you have to forget about having a personal life which is not very healthy for us as human beings.
That’s why adopting the team treatment philosophy for your PT clinic can do wonders and really solve issues that you had not thought of so far.
Good, functional, and healthy teamwork can help us accomplish amazing things. Why not apply it to the clinic? After all, wasn’t it Mother Teresa who said: “None of us, including me, ever do great things. But we can all do small things, with great love, and together we can do something wonderful.”
