Ideal care in medical-surgical units is reliably safe and error-free, responsive to patient needs and preferences, rewarding and satisfying to staff, and highly efficient. Hospitals cannot meet the current challenge by fine-tuning the status quo or exhorting staff to work more diligently, they must establish new models of care.
Promising new models of care for medical-surgical patients are emerging from the Transforming Care at the Bedside project. These models form the basis for the continued work in this topic area as part of IHI's Taking Action to Transform Care at the Bedside Learning and Innovation Community.
The four primary areas of focus in transforming medical-surgical care include: Safety and Reliability; Care Team Vitality; Patient-Centered Care; and Increased Value. These four improvement areas serve as a framework for organizing and focusing the work, but in fact they are highly interdependent. Working in one area can produce positive change in another. IHI believes that by working in all four categories simultaneously, care teams will produce truly transformative results in medical-surgical care.
