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I am the program director for an inpatient rehabilitation unit. When I listened to the Hot Wast podcast, I immediately wondered how I could apply this concept to patient care. If you think of an individual patient as a "project", I think you could do a hot wash after the patient discharges. In particular, I am thinking about complicated patients with longer than average length of stay and heavy multi-disciplinary involvement. I have some ideas about how this might work in my facility, but I wondered if there were any other health care managers out there who had thought along these lines. I would really like to open a dialog with some other people on this topic and see if we can do some idea sharing.

Craig

Mark's picture
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Craig-

I've done what you suggest over a thousand times. I've had hospitals and physicians practices as clients for years.

It's a PERFECT use of the Hot Wash. Make sure you facilitate, be clear about groundrules and avoid blaming (ala' an M&M conference), get docs there when possible, and make it shorter and faster initially. For your first few, study a case enough to be able to guide the discussion a little, or have a nurse assist you.

After you've done a bunch, encourage the charge nurses to do them locally - faster, more value, more immediate uptake in better patient outcome behaviors.

Mark

pinzraider's picture

Mark -

Thanks for the advice. I am fired up about this, and I have a couple of patients in mind to try it with. I will post a summary of my experiences after we run the first few.

Craig.

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Craig-

Great! I look forward to the summary.

Mark

pinzraider's picture

We have been using the Hot Wash with great success for about 3 months now. I wanted to update the forum with some of my experiences. As I mentioned at the top of this thread, I am a manager for an inpatient rehabilitation facility in an acute care hospital. My application of the hot wash was in regard to patient care, essentially treating each patient as a "project". I feel like we gained a lot of value from these sessions, and we have made MANY positive changes as a result. Since then, we have expanded the use of the hotwash to include just about anything I can think of as a project. My staff and I have been so impressed with the value of these sessions that we have become pretty liberal in our definition of what can be hotwashed. A couple of things we have found from our experience:
1) Groups of 10-20 people seem to be easier for me to facilitate than groups of 5 or less. I attribute this primarily to my own lack of experience as a facilitator, rather than to a failure of the model. What I find with the small group is that it is harder for me to keep them within the confines of "brainstorming", and away from the process of "problem-solving".
2) Reviewing the ground rules of the Hot Wash before each session, even with groups of staff who have been through one before, is a MUST.
3) There are several members of my staff who are MUCH better at facilitating a Hot Wash than I am, so I let 'em.
4) Most sessions offer several easy mods that we can implement "for free" with immediate impact.

I appreciate any comments or feedback regarding this post!

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Home run! Glad it's working so well. Hotwash is a POWERFUL tool!

Mark