Page 10 - Christiana Care Focus October 2018

The Christiana Care Way |
‘Serving together’ distills physician assistant values into essentials
Our care flows from our values, as a tree grows from its roots. The first three words of our values and behaviors — “We Serve
Together” — cement our individual values in a team context.
In the operating room, nurses, surgical technologists, anesthesia providers, phy- sician assistants, residents, surgeons and others all serve together as a highly func- tioning team with the patient at the center of our focus.
Being part of a team is ingrained in every physician assistant’s DNA. As our profession changes, our role is supported by core values that show through simple acts of kindness, like listening.
When trying to ease a patient’s anxiety just before surgery I often ask about their per- sonal lives. Sometimes I find an unexpected bond. Maybe they’re a Penn State graduate like me; or maybe we’ll trade anecdotes about our children.
Sometimes their emotions include anxiety and fear. Their worries tend to stem from their lack of knowledge. They may want to know whether it will hurt, when they might be able to go back to work or when they can eat.
And sometimes, even though a host of caregivers is diligently preparing for the procedure, patients perceive chaos in all the activity. This is a time when a simple, human connection matters most.
I can be that connection for families. Expe- riences with one of my children taught me what it’s like to have a critically ill loved one undergo surgery and how much it means to hear a firsthand account of how it went.
Interactions with patients and the values that animate them offer physician assis- tants more opportunities to do what we love: comfort and care for patients.
8 CHRISTIANA CARE HEALTH SYSTEM
Christiana Care’s values — especially finding ways to innovate using our shared resources effectively and listening to our colleagues while assuming their good intentions — resonate strongly with us physician assistants. Our clinical expertise reflects our commitment to treat patients with love and excellence.
Christiana Care’s Advanced Quality and Safety Improvement Science Program, a train-the-trainer effort to spread methods of continuous quality improvement, helped one of my surgical colleagues, Jonathan Miller, PA-C, develop an onboarding pro- tocol for new surgical physician assistants that prepares newly hired PAs with a men- tor and establishes a training system that builds excellence and confidence by moving from the least to most complex cases.
Other physician assistants innovate by developing patient education tools that speak to our basic values. Mary Fran Storm, PA-C, for example, has led the research and writing for two patient apps:
• A pregnancy app under development to support mothers through all four trimes- ters — the three during pregnancy along with the first three months after birth.
• An app to support surgical patients from scheduling through several weeks post-operation.
Her work is guided by the knowledge that patients are comforted by knowing the likely course of their care.
Because our flexibility and broad training allows us to see patients across the health system, physician assistants are an integral part of the health system’s focus on value- based care.
In surgery, physician assistants are involved in more than 11,000 procedures a year, and we play a significant role in minimizing valuable time in the operating room.
A 2016 study in the Journal of Clinical Outcomes Management found that including physician assistants in hospitalist care teams correlates with lower average costs and no significant difference in the quality of care.
By Justin B. Guerin, PA-C
Improving our clinical
skills is part of excel-
lence, too. For a phy-
sician assistant, that
means training under
a physician’s guidance
to build skills and
privileges to perform certain procedures. That said, all physician assistants can pre- scribe medication, order advanced imaging and diagnose and treat illness.
Teamwork is a core part of our culture. By nature of our training, the elements of working as a team are intertwined with what it means to be a physician assistant.
Part of serving together is assuming good intentions. When our colleagues make decisions we may question, it helps to demonstrate the behavior of assuming good intentions and remember they’re acting
out of a need to advocate for their patients. In addition to smoothing collaboration — disagreements are more easily diffused when we see the good in each other — it also helps us understand our colleagues on a more personal level.
Every day, my colleagues in surgery, emergency medicine, internal medicine, intensive care, palliative care and other units live out the ultimate standard for compassion, by treating their patients the way they’d want their families to be treated.
My own motivation comes from seeing the improvement a patient experiences after surgery, whether that means potentially curing their cancer, restoring their function or taking away their pain.
The sense of meaning and purpose I get from changing patients’ lives guided me to medicine, and it guides me each day during interactions with patients.
Christiana Care’s 220 or so physician assistants are spread throughout the health system, embedded in teams of their own, their experiences covering the gamut of what it means to serve with excellence and love. 