Physician and Nurse Practitioner Teamwork Sustains the Primary Care Workforce

Excerpt

In 2012, the Institute of Medicine reported that teams are an “essential tool for constructing a more patient-centered, coordinated, and effective health care delivery system.” [1] Effective teams, they argued, hold greatest promise when providing care for patients with multiple chronic conditions and co-morbidities such as those often seen in the typical primary care practice setting. Subsequent qualitative research suggests that the delegation of non-clinical tasks away from clinicians and expanding the involvement of other team members in patient care improves provider satisfaction with their work [2]. In this issue of the Journal of General Internal Medicine, Poghosyan and colleagues report on results of a survey of primary care nurse practitioners and physicians practicing in New York State exploring the relationship between teamwork in their practices, satisfaction with their work, and perceived quality of patient care they delivered [3]. Overall, both types of respondents reported similar levels of job satisfaction and assessments of the quality of care in their practices. Respondents from practices with environments seen as more favorable to teamwork had a more positive assessment of the quality of care delivered in their practices, were more satisfied with their jobs, and were less likely to express an intent to leave their current job. In other words, practices with greater perceived teamwork had lower levels of the common markers of provider-reported burnout. …