Examining role change in primary care practice

Impact of cultural values on leadership roles and paternalistic style from the role theory perspective

Purpose

This paper researches the effects of the cultural context from values' ground on leadership roles and the effects of roles on styles. The idea behind this study is to show that cultural communities have different cultural models regarding the kinds of roles leaders should or should not play.

Design/methodology/approach

The sample was chosen from the part of the town where the immigrant workforce is growing, as well as it is the closest growing economic area to Europe in Turkey.

Findings

The analysis shows that cultural values significantly affect leadership roles. Additionally, there is a correlation between roles and paternalistic leadership style. Asian cultural values do affect leadership roles more than Western values. Additionally, each culture is diminishing the other. As leadership roles increase, they are acting as paternalistic leadership substitutes.

Originality/value

Interestingly we have introduced paternalistic leadership substitutes to literature and showed that paternalistic leadership is not only culturally but also contextually bounded.

Time Costs for Genetic Counseling in Preconception Carrier Screening with Genome Sequencing

Advances in technology and the promise of personalized health care are driving greater use of genome sequencing (GS) for a variety of clinical scenarios. As health systems consider adopting GS, they need to understand the impact of GS on the organization and cost of care. While research has documented a dramatic decrease in the cost of sequencing and interpreting GS, few studies have examined how GS impacts genetic counseling workloads. This study examined the time needed to provide genetic counseling for GS in the context of preconception carrier screening. Genetic counselors prospectively reported on the time spent in the results disclosure process with 107 study participants who were part of the NextGen study. We found that the median time for results disclosure was 64 min (ranged from 5 to 229 min). Preparation work was the most time-consuming activity. Qualitative data from journal entries, debrief interviews with genetic counselors, and detailed case conference notes provided information on factors influencing time for results disclosure and implications for practice. Results suggest that expanded carrier screening could require significant increases in genetic counseling time, unless we are able to generate new resources to reduce preparation work or develop other strategies such as the creation of new models to deliver this type of service.

Effect of care management program structure on implementation: a normalization process theory analysis

Background

Care management in primary care can be effective in helping patients with chronic disease improve their health status, however, primary care practices are often challenged with implementation. Further, there are different ways to structure care management that may make implementation more or less successful. Normalization process theory (NPT) provides a means of understanding how a new complex intervention can become routine (normalized) in practice. In this study, we used NPT to understand how care management structure affected how well care management became routine in practice.

Methods

Data collection involved semi-structured interviews and observations conducted at 25 practices in five physician organizations in Michigan, USA. Practices were selected to reflect variation in physician organizations, type of care management program, and degree of normalization. Data were transcribed, qualitatively coded and analyzed, initially using an editing approach and then a template approach with NPT as a guiding framework.

Results

Seventy interviews and 25 observations were completed. Two key structures for care management organization emerged: practice-based care management where the care managers were embedded in the practice as part of the practice team; and centralized care management where the care managers worked independently of the practice work flow and was located outside the practice. There were differences in normalization of care management across practices. Practice-based care management was generally better normalized as compared to centralized care management. Differences in normalization were well explained by the NPT, and in particular the collective action construct. When care managers had multiple and flexible opportunities for communication (interactional workability), had the requisite knowledge, skills, and personal characteristics (skill set workability), and the organizational support and resources (contextual integration), a trusting professional relationship (relational integration) developed between practice providers and staff and the care manager. When any of these elements were missing, care management implementation appeared to be affected negatively.

Conclusions

Although care management can introduce many new changes into delivery of clinical practice, implementing it successfully as a new complex intervention is possible. NPT can be helpful in explaining differences in implementing a new care management program with a view to addressing them during implementation planning.

Electronic supplementary material

The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12913-016-1613-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

"It goes beyond good camaraderie": A qualitative study of the process of becoming an interprofessional healthcare "teamlet"

Within the US, the patient-centred medical home has become a predominant model in the delivery of primary care. This model requires a shift from the physician-centric model to an interprofessional team-based approach. Thus, healthcare staff are being reorganized into teams, resulting in having to work and relate to one another in new ways. In 2010, the Veterans Health Administration implemented the patient aligned care team (PACT) model, its version of the patient-centred medical home. The transition to the PACT model involved restructuring primary care staff into "teamlets", consisting of a registered nurse, licensed practical nurse, and administrative clerk for each full-time-equivalent primary care provider. This qualitative study used observation and semi-structured interviews to understand the factors that affect teamlet functioning as they implement this new model of care and how teams are interacting to address those factors. Findings suggest that role understanding includes understanding how each teamlet member's tasks are performed in the daily operations of the clinic. In addition, willingness to perform tasks that benefit the teamlet and acceptance of delegation from all teamlet members were found to be important for teamlet functioning and cohesion. In order for healthcare teams to provide patient-centred care, it is important to provide guidance and support about what these new relationships and roles will entail. The building of team relationships is not a static process; ways of working together build over time and, therefore, should be seen as a continuous cycle of quality improvement.

Understanding effective care management implementation in primary care: a macrocognition perspective analysis

BACKGROUND

Care management in primary care can be effective in helping patients with chronic disease improve their health status. Primary care practices, however, are often challenged with its implementation. Incorporating care management involves more than a simple physical process redesign to existing clinical care routines. It involves changes to who is working with patients, and consequently such things as who is making decisions, who is sharing patient information, and how. Studying the range of such changes in "knowledge work" during implementation requires a perspective and tools designed to do so. We used the macrocognition perspective, which is designed to understand how individuals think in dynamic, messy real-world environments such as care management implementation. To do so, we used cognitive task analysis to understand implementation in terms of such thinking as decision making, knowledge, and communication.

METHODS

Data collection involved semi-structured interviews and observations at baseline and at approximately 9 months into implementation at five practices in one physician-owned administratively connected group of practices in the state of Michigan, USA. Practices were intervention participants in a larger trial of chronic care model implementation. Data were transcribed, qualitatively coded and analyzed, initially using an editing approach and then a template approach with macrocognition as a guiding framework.

RESULTS

Seventy-four interviews and five observations were completed. There were differences in implementation success across the practices, and these differences in implementation success were well explained by macrocognition. Practices that used more macrocognition functions and used them more often were also more successful in care management implementation.

CONCLUSIONS

Although care management can introduce many new changes into the delivery of primary care clinical practice, implementing it successfully as a new complex intervention is possible. Macrocognition is a useful perspective for illuminating the elements that facilitate new complex interventions with a view to addressing them during implementation planning.

Implementation of healthy lifestyle promotion in primary care: patients as coproducers

OBJECTIVES

To explore and theorize how patients perceive, interpret, and reactin healthy lifestyle promotion situations in primary care and to investigate patients' role in implementation of lifestyle promotion illustrated by typologies.

METHODS

Grounded theory was used to assess qualitative interview data from 22 patients with varied experience of healthy lifestyle promotion. Data were analyzed by constant comparative analysis.

RESULTS

A substantive theory of being healthy emerged from the data. The theory highlights the processes that are important for implementation before, during, and after lifestyle promotion. Three interconnected categories emerged from the data: conditions for being healthy, managing being healthy, and interactions about being healthy; these formed the core category: being healthy. A typology proposed four patient trajectories on being healthy: resigned, receivers, coworkers, and leaders.

CONCLUSION

Patients coproduced the implementation of lifestyle promotion through the degree of transparency, which was a result of patients' expectations and situation appraisals.

PRACTICE IMPLICATIONS

Different approaches are needed during lifestyle promotion depending on a variety of patient-related factors. The typology could guide practitioners in their lifestyle promotion practice.

A novel triage approach of child preventive health assessment: an observational study of routine registry-data

BACKGROUND

The coverage of preventive health assessments for children is pivotal to the system of preventive health screening. A novel method of triage was introduced in the Preventive Youth Health Care (PYHC) system in the Netherlands with an associated shift of tasks of professionals. Doctor's assistants carried out pre-assessments to identify children in need of follow-up assessment, whereas in the traditional approach all children would have been screened by a doctor or nurse. The accessibility and care delivery of this new PYHC system was studied.

METHODS

The new triage approach was compared to the traditional approach in 780 children undergoing PYHC assessment with the use of an observational retrospective study design. Outcomes were attendance of assessment appointments (accessibility of care) and referral of children to either extra PYHC assessment or external specialised care (delivery of preventive care). PYHC registry data were analysed. In two regions of the Netherlands, 390 children five to six years of age were randomly selected from the PYHC registries according to the socio-economic strata of the schools they attended.

RESULTS

When the triage and traditional approaches to PYHC were compared, we found similar attendance rates for assessment appointments, namely about 90%. As expected, 100% of the children in the traditional group were assessed by a PYHC doctor compared to 46% of the children in the triage group. Significantly fewer children were referred for extra PYHC assessment or for treatment by an external specialised care giver when a triage as opposed to the traditional assessment approach was used (19.6% vs. 45.9%).

CONCLUSIONS

The novel triage approach for preventive health assessment shows equal accessibility, but a different delivery of preventive care. A beneficial effect of the adoption of the triage approach is the opportunity to provide more attention from doctors and nurses to children at risk of health problems. However, lower referral rates of the triage approach may be explained by an under-identification of children with health problems. Further research is needed to document the health outcomes and the possible reduction of health care costs with a triage approach compared to traditional PYHC care.