Monthly Archives: April 2014

Football, Nursing and Clinical Supervision

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When I started this blog in September 2012 I made a half-joke that watching Adelaide play in the AFL can inform clinical practice (see Number 8 meta4RN.com/about).

Well, as it turns out, this is absolutely true. Please let me explain. 

 

The Adelaide Crows, like all elite sporting teams, spend a lot of time preparing to play. For those unfamiliar with Australian Rules Football (AFL) it’s a fast, free-flowing, physical game that is played weekly during the winter months. Here’s a sample of play:

A game of AFL is played over four quarters, each lasting approximately 30 minutes (nominally each quarter is 20 minutes, but the clock stops when the ball is out of play). So, any player who stays on the ground for every moment of the game will play for two hours.

Guess how much time the player spends preparing for that two hours.

Crows warm-up at training. From left, Jarryd Lyons, Ian Callinan, Daniel Talia and Taylor Walker. Picture: Sarah Reed via Herald Sun.

Crows warm-up at training. From left, Jarryd Lyons, Ian Callinan, Daniel Talia and Taylor Walker. Picture: Sarah Reed via Herald Sun.

Think about what goes into preparation: recovery from the previous game, keeping-up and improving fitness levels, practicing individual skills, practicing team skills, discussing and developing team strategies, having coaches give feedback on what you did well and what areas could be improved, developing on-ground leadership and communication skills, nurturing confidence in yourself and your team-mates, learning about the team you’ll be playing against next week. The list goes on.

My brother, Bernie McNamara, has seen the Adelaide Crows up-close and personal over the last few years. Bern says that typically during the season a player will have about 25 contact hours each week with the club, and be expected to do about 10 hours of preparation away from the club.

So, each week, a diligent AFL player will spend  about 35 hours preparing for no more than 2 hours play.

How does that preparation:work ratio compare for clinicians?

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It’s not just the explicit hands-on knowledge that counts, it’s also very important that we make time for thinking-about, discussing and reflecting on our clinical roles. Clinicians, like footballers, have a desire to improve, but we may have to fight for support to do so. As noted at a recent seminar regarding clinical supervision, “in a time of austerity, high caseloads and increasing problems, the organisation is often satisfied with a ‘good enough’ (work task) rather than seeking excellence. This tends to reduce supervision to a control function rather than aspiring to best practice.” Source: Talking about supervision: conversations in Bolzano and London 

I have written about clinical supervision previously (in “Nurturing the Nurturers” meta4RN.com/nurturers), but perhaps undersold it – some have commented that it seems like a feel-good exercise for clinicians. There’s more to it than that.

Clinical supervision is a key component in providing high quality services with positive outcomes for those who use health services. Clinical supervision promotes a well trained, highly skilled and supported workforce, and adds to the development, retention and motivation of the workforce. High quality clinical supervision also contributes to meeting performance standards, meeting the expectations of consumers/carers/families and goes a long way towards developing a learning culture in a changing health care environment. Source: ClinicalSupervision

Clinical supervision guidelines are very modest compared to the preparation:work ratio of AFL footballers. Clinical supervision requires nothing like the investment of 35 hours of preparation for 2 hours of play, instead, it’s something like 1 hour of preparation for every 80 or 160 hours of work.

Are nurses, midwives and other clinicians worth the expense?

I’ve been thinking about this tweet lately:

I’m wondering whether we can tweak that sign a little – maybe something like this:

The Financial Perspective: “We can’t afford to spend money on nurses and midwives sitting around talking, thinking and reflecting.”

The Patient Safety Perspective: “We can’t afford not to.”

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As always, your feedback/comments are welcome.

Paul McNamara, 27th April 2014

Trying to Stay Focused

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PatientFocused Some days it feels like a cruel conspiracy.

Those are the days when it feels like the time and space I have made to speak one-to-one to the patient* is in the middle of a sports arena. The patient and I walk into the middle of the empty playing surface and make our preparations for meaningful discussion, for emotional catharsis, for education, for counselling, for disclosure, for discovery, for therapy.

Then the grandstands of the arena start filling with people with loud voices. These people are not providing frontline care, so we would like to think of them as supporters. However, they all seem to think of themselves as coaches. They each have their own special area(s) of interest and shout well-meaning advice from their seats in the grandstand.

It gets very rowdy and distracting. SystemsFocused So many supporters coaches. So many systems**.

Systems are what makes airlines so safe – apparently that’s why hospitals have become so system-focused over the last couple of decades. I think it is a bit silly that public health systems try so hard to align themselves with profit-making airline systems. The cost of a regional hospital redevelopment ($454m) is about the same cost as two Boeing 787s (source), However, they serve very different purposes: the hospital is filled with critically ill people aiming to become less unwell or die with dignity. Commercial jets are filled with tourists and business people going on a planned journey. The hospital is a place of unknowns: discovery, diagnosis, treatment, trials and strong, unpredictable human emotions. A commercial jet is a trumped-up bus that travels at a scheduled time on a scheduled route between clearly defined destinations, carrying only people who are wealthy and healthy enough to travel long distances.

Hospitals and airlines have such very different clients, expectations, control and outcomes – can they really teach-each other much about systems?

Nevertheless, I understand the rationale for systems, and will make no effort to argue against them. Still, wouldn’t it be nice if there was one healthcare system? As it stands in my workplace, the emergency department has a system (EDIS) that does not speak to the ICU system (MetaVision), which does not speak to the general hospital system (ieMR), which does not speak to the mental health system (CIMHA). And that’s just within one hospital – imagine how fragmented it gets when we start thinking of the primary healthcare and rural/remote outpatient sectors.

I understand that some of these systems, some of these competing demands, are very important – but not all of them are. For example, it is not important that a clinician spend time away from their patients to transpose a bit of information that is in one hospital system into another hospital system –  this is a matter of dumb systems.

Which is why nurses and other clinicians know that sometimes the safest, most compassionate, and most ethical thing to do is to turn their back on the distractions created by dozens of disjointed systems, and make the priority to simply be with the patient.

Why? Because we are trying to stay focused – patient focused.

*Clarification re using the word “Patient”

In mental health over the last couple of decades nomenclature has changed from “patient” to “client” to “consumer” or “service user”. I understand the rationale for this – it is to move away from the passive (i.e.: “patient” as someone that the “expert” diagnoses and fixes) to participant (i.e.: “informed “consumer” of a service). In my current role I provide mental health assessment, support and education in a general hospital – the people I see are, in this context, first-and-foremost medical/surgical/obsetric hospital inpatients. It is these people’s physical health that had them admitted to an acute general hospital as “patients”, hence my use the word here.

**All the systems named in the “Systems Focused” cartoon are real, as is the claim that using each one is VERY IMPORTANT.

Tech Tip

I used an easy-to-use iPad app called Notes Plus to draw the cartoons. As you can see, my artistic skills have pretty-much plateaued since kindergarten, as has my spelling. Nevertheless, I think the cartoon might have been a little better and a lot easier to draw if I had used a stylus – that’s what I would recommend if you plan to do something similar.

End

As always, your thoughts/feedback is welcome in the comments section below.

Paul McNamara, 6th April 2014