Moving Teamwork into Teaming: Evaluating a Team-Based Model of Nursing Care

Nursing practice faces staffing shortages, complex patient care, and a need to develop creative ways to fill staffing holes within the acute care clinical setting (Beckett et al., 2021). A hospital in New Hampshire, United States implemented a team-based nursing care model on a geriatric psychiatric unit in January 2023. The model has been in place for 18 months. The focus of this Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) quality improvement (QI) evaluation project was to determine if implementing the team-based nursing model of care improved patient outcomes such as falls, restraint use, and hospital-acquired pressure injuries and reduced the number of patients requiring discharge from a behavioral health unit to a medical-surgical unit. Using a correlational analysis for QI scores, I evaluated quality scores before and after implementing the team-based nursing model. The quality scores showed no significant change in the number of falls, zero restraint use, or hospital-acquired pressure injury prevention cases. A decreased number of patients requiring medical management for clinical deterioration was found. The use of a consistent team-based model is beneficial for this nursing unit to improve continuity with patient care assignments and fall reduction efforts. The literature validated that team-based models can promote social change through equitable care and improve quality of patient care, optimizing outcomes, and meeting the needs for safer nursing practice.