Ashley Goveas
An Ontario nurse is fighting against efforts to dismantle team-based care in Ontario, citing benefits for everyone involved — ranging from patients to the nurses themselves.
Jo-anne Marr, the president and CEO of Oak Valley Health in Markham recently spoke out against “slander” towards team-based nursing, saying team-based care is not a way to save costs, but to help patients more efficiently.
“I want to provide a different perspective, as someone who began their nursing career as part of a team-based model and now as a hospital administrator facing a critical nursing shortage,” Marr wrote in a blog post published to the Ontario Hospital Association.
Currently, Ontario hospitals operate on a model — called primary nursing or total patient care — that tasks a single nurse with caring for every aspect of a patient’s healing. According to Marr, some critics say disrupting this model will lead to “fragmented care.”
But, teams are not unique to nursing, Marr wrote, and having team-based care in the nursing profession will help maximize the care each patient receives as each team member in a multi-disciplinary team can address one specific, specialized need.
Marr added she’s not arguing for less nurses, but more diverse care teams of health professions where “each team member [can] function to the full extent of their education, certification, and experience.” Marr also said more nurses will benefit this care model by encouraging autonomy and stronger employee retention.
“I worked in a team based model alongside orderlies, nursing assistants, rehabilitation nurses, lab technicians and other supporting staff. This team helped me enormously to care for my patients, regularly checking in on them, particularly those who were unstable and needing close attention,” Marr wrote.
Marr added that teams are not new or unique to nursing, and they function extremely efficiently in other industries, like dentistry.
“Team-based care can help keep our current nurses working in health care and encourage future nurses to go to nursing school by granting them the autonomy to lead patient care,” Marr said.
“Team-based care can be a tool to retain and recruit nurses, through elevating the profession and giving nurses the supports they need to focus on delivering exceptional patient care.”
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