Nurse-Led Model of Care That Helps a Community Heal: Curbside Immunizations With Assistance in Social Determinants.

The COVID-19 pandemic has overwhelmed communities. Physical, emotional, and financial struggles have heightened, especially with our vulnerable populations. People have been afraid to return to their provider's office. For children, there has been an interruption of well-visits and immunizations. As the nation saw a decline in immunization uptake, a pilot nurse-led program was designed to increase vaccinations and address the social determinant needs during a global pandemic. The purpose of this article is to describe the planning and implementation of a curbside immunization event. The Logic model was used as a framework to ensure an efficient and replicable process. Initial observations showed an overall increase in immunization uptake and 97% of participants current with recommended vaccinations. Most parents (93%) would attend again and recommend it to others. They also felt that infection control precautions helped make the care delivered safe and efficient. Social determinants of health were assessed and addressed. This method of vaccine delivery is a viable model going into the future. Others may replicate this model, and it may also serve as a platform regarding flu or COVID-19 vaccine distribution.

Strategies and Barriers to Engaging Dual-Eligible Patients in a Hospital Patient and Family Advisory Program.

As national efforts intensify to improve health outcomes and reduce health care costs, hospitals search for effective ways to partner with patients and families to achieve these goals. Many are implementing patient and family advisory programs (PFAPs) where patients, families, administrators, and clinicians work together to improve the patient experience. However, hospitals struggle with engaging the underserved-specifically, dual-eligible patients enrolled in both Medicare and Medicaid-in PFAPs. This quality improvement project used telephone interviews with 12 dual-eligible beneficiaries and 4 of their providers to identify successful approaches to engage these patients in the hospital PFAP. While none of the participants had direct experience with a PFAP, many of the strategies and barriers identified from their individual care experiences will be used to inform the hospital's plan to engage this patient population in future patient and family engagement efforts.

Family physician attitudes about prescribing using a drug formulary.

BACKGROUND: Drug formularies have been created by third party payers to control prescription drug usage and manage costs. Physicians try to provide the best care for their patients. This research examines family physicians' attitudes regarding prescription reimbursement criteria, prescribing and advocacy for patients experiencing reimbursement barriers. METHODS: Focus groups were used to collect qualitative data on family physicians' prescribing decisions related to drug reimbursement guidelines. Forty-eight family physicians from four Ontario cities participated. Ethics approval for this study was received from the Hamilton Health Sciences/Faculty of Health Sciences Research Ethics Board at McMaster University. Four clinical scenarios were used to situate and initiate focus group discussions about prescribing decisions. Open-ended questions were used to probe physicians' experiences and attitudes and responses were audio recorded. NVivo software was used to assist in data analysis. RESULTS: Most physicians reported that drug reimbursement guidelines complicated their prescribing process and can require lengthy interpretation and advocacy for patients who require medication that is subject to reimbursement restrictions. CONCLUSION: Physicians do not generally see their role as being cost-containment monitors and observed that cumbersome reimbursement guidelines influence medication choice beyond the clinical needs of the patient, and produce unequal access to medication. They observed that frustration, discouragement, fatigue, and lack of appreciation can often contribute to family physicians' failure to advocate more for patients. Physicians argue cumbersome reimbursement regulations contribute to lower quality care and misuse of physicians' time increasing overall health care costs by adding unnecessary visits to family physicians, specialists, and emergency rooms.

Narrativizing errors of care: critical incident reporting in clinical practice.

This paper considers the rise across acute care settings in the industrialized world of techniques that encourage clinicians to record their experiences about adverse events they are personally involved in; that is, to share narratives about errors, mishaps or 'critical incidents'. The paper proposes that critical incident reporting and the 'root cause' investigations it affords, are both central to the effort to involve clinicians in managing and organizing their work, and a departure from established methods and approaches to achieve clinicians' involvement in these non-clinical domains of health care. We argue that critical incident narratives render visible details of the clinical work that have thus far only been discussed in closed, paperless meetings, and that, as narratives, they incite individuals to share personal experiences with parties previously excluded from knowledge about failure. Drawing on a study of 124 medical retrieval incident reports, the paper provides illustrations and interpretations of both the narrative and the meta-discursive dimensions of critical incident reporting. We suggest that, as a new and complex genre, critical incident reporting achieves three important objectives. First, it provides clinicians with a channel for dealing with incidents in a way that brings problems to light in a non-blaming way and that might therefore be morally satisfying and perhaps even therapeutic. Second, these narrations make available new spaces for the apprehension, identification and performance of self. Here, the incident report becomes a space where clinicians publicly perform concern about what happened. Third, incident reporting becomes the basis for radically altering the clinician-organization relationship. As a complex expression of clinical failure and its re-articulation into organizational meta-discourse, incident reporting puts doctors' selves and feelings at risk not just within the relative safety of personal or intra-professional relationships, but also in the normative context of organizational coordination, accountability, planning and management.