Healthcare Inclusion Works has a history of successfully diversifying hospital care teams. Not unlike a sports team, adding specialized positions improves overall performance.
The hidden costs and impact of recruiting, travel nurse bridges on an overworked healthcare team are tremendous. Some days it feels like a never-ending battle just to fill the open shifts, encourage the discouraged members of the team, and manage a rotating door of staff.
New nurses joining the team are eager to begin their profession, but they often have blind spots that need mentoring, support, and energy. Without this, they are at higher risk for attrition. Nurses need more time to focus on the next generation of nurses.
Sharing the best practices and training/education of each clinical focus area lifts the entire team. In the same way that adding a respiratory therapist in the ICU, or a pharmacist in the ER leads to different perspectives, backgrounds, and knowledge bases, adding paramedics to teams improves the diversity of care provided.
Healthcare has effectively added additional specialties to the patient care team for decades. Placing paramedics in the hospital environment, at an appropriate scope of practice, is a tool that savvy hospital leaders are leveraging to great effect to team health can patient care.
The scope of practice of paramedics complements the nursing and other in-hospital healthcare. The education and focus of paramedicine span several specialties, enabling healthcare teams to benefit from a unique scope of knowledge and practice.
A bias can blind all clinicians. We form it often based on our least appreciated interactions with a member of another healthcare tribe. We, patients, families, and communities, cannot afford for these biases to limit the tools we use to create the strongest healthcare safety nets possible.
We are doing better and building more inclusive, diverse interdisciplinary care teams. But the work is not complete; there are still tribes siloed from others, often from a place of distrust, misunderstanding, and biases each tribe has formed or been trained to believe. Too often, our own stories and beliefs about others drive color best practices and limit thinking.
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Adding Paramedics to the hospital care team roster taps into a skilled healthcare workforce that can significantly impact staffing challenges, retention, and patient care.
Hospital and EMS Alignment (HEAL)
Both rural hospitals and local ambulance services are struggling to maintain staffing and capacity. By aligning priorities and working together, the community safety net is strengthened.
HEAL ProgramsUsing a small cohort of specially trained and highly experienced paramedics creates a unique environment to assess the effectiveness of placing paramedics on your team while limiting the risk and exposure of starting with full-time employees. Programs that start with travel paramedics in their hospitals often find that they can accurately predict if the value of paramedics in their hospital will be worth in within six months of the program starting.
Paramedics on hospital teams do not always work. A methodical, step-wise, limited-commitment-and-risk option gives leaders, teams, and individuals the opportunity to test-drive the model before investing in a full-scope implementation and full-time hires.
If the model works for your team, the initial iterations and lessons refined the best practice for including paramedics on the team. Organizations are phasing out travel paramedics as they add full-time employees to their rosters. Building on the lessons learned, saving time, money, and energy when establishing a permanent program. Occasionally, the value of including new team members is not aligned with the hospital's needs, and these observations lead to other internal projects and improvements.