Multidisciplinary Team Working toolkit
Expanding practice teams brings the opportunity to embed new skills into primary care, widens the range of services offered by general practice and works towards resolving some of the challenges currently faced in primary care.
Demand and capacity
Assessment and management of demand
Some questions you can ask:
- What are the current and future staffing issues you are facing?
- What is your demand like?
- What are the gaps in your demand and capacity?
Knowing the level and characteristics of the demand on your practice, enables you to design any effective interventions and evaluate their impact.
The World Health Organisation paper Determining skill mix in the health workforce: guidelines for managers and health professionals suggests we start with four approaches:
- Evaluate the need for changing your team
- Map autonomy and flexibility and identifying the opportunities and barriers for change
- Assess resource availability and plan for change
- Identifying appropriate approach to skill mix and make the change happen
Demand and capacity
The West of England Academic Health Science Network 'Measuring demand in General Practice' report in 2015 made the following recommendations:
- Actively measure demand and trying to fully understand the extent of demand. Rather than trying to fit demand around existing capacity.
- Find a common tool both for measuring demand and measuring performance against that demand. This allows Practices to evaluate the changes they are making.
- Avoid making continuous operational change because of a desire to meet increasing levels of patient expectations in their ongoing quest to deliver more immediate services to a greater volume of patients
- Using telephony services to measure telephone volume data was a reasonable proxy measure for demand. Phone systems should be able to provide you with call volumes, volume patterns, waiting times and abandonment rates.
Most clinical IT systems provide workload information. Such as consultation rates filtered by age and gender, and broken down by face-to-face consultations, telephone calls, e-consults and home visits.