The Primary Care Team model grew out of the desire to create a culture of safety in an increasingly difficult care environment where LOS is declining, patient acuity is increasing, and the portion of RN positions filled by novice nurses is increasing.

Specifically, Seton developed the Primary Care Team in order to achieve the following goals.

• Improve quality of care
• Improve patient safety
• Increase patient, physician and staff satisfaction
• Decrease LOS
• Reduce or result in no change to costs

Seton Family of Hospitals nurses developed the Primary Care Team model in 2000.  The model grew out of an initiative to design a care delivery model that would retain experienced nurses in an oversight role for all patients, foster team building and mentoring of new nurses, and enable a strong patient partnership.

Seton’s participation in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation initiative Transforming Care at the Bedside helped them continue to make changes to the model and implement it in more units.  The PCT model was further strengthened by staff-led innovations.  For example, one initiative included writing the name and portable phone number of the nurse on a white board in the patient’s room to enable the patient to call the nurse directly.   This initiative resulted in high patient satisfaction as demonstrated in the post-pilot surveys, and improved efficiency by greatly reducing the number of calls from the patient for a nurse to come to the room.