Background:

Interprofessional healthcare teams enhance care coordination for individual patients. However, such teams do not typically have a mandate or design which promotes vision‐setting, innovation, or leadership beyond immediate clinical care delivery.

Purpose:

To describe development of a unit‐based interprofessional leadership infrastructure and evaluate themes of participant motivation.

Description:

From front‐line providers of a care team dedicated to care of geriatric inpatients, volunteers were solicited to join a “Hospital Geriatric Leadership Committee”. Core principles of the leadership team include shared ownership, with nursing and physician co‐chairs, and consensus‐based decision‐making. Leadership Team composition includes therapy, nursing, patient liaison, social work, physicians, pharmacy, quality, and administrative support with monthly meetings. The sequential steps in team development included:

  • 1)

    Collective vision‐setting with definition of mission and scope.

  • 2)

    Defining quality metrics relevant to patients, providers, and hospital with benchmarks and monthly data reporting.

  • 3)

    Prioritizing and implementing quality improvement projects to influence unit performance.

Comparing 6 months prior to leadership team establishment to comparable 6 month period 2 years later 3 of 6 quality domains demonstrated improvement including reduction in all‐cause readmissions from 15% to 5% and increasing hand hygiene adherence from 83% to 97%.

Current and past participants received a written survey on why they participate in the leadership team. Written survey results were analyzed using thematic network analysis. From 17 participant’s free‐text surveys, 59 concept codes were abstracted which mapped onto 14 basic themes. Three organizing themes were identified: “Participating in a Highly Functioning Interprofessional Team”, “Facilitating Positive Patient‐Centric Outcomes,” and “Professional Development”.

Conclusions:

An interdisciplinary leadership team can create a culture where front‐line staff are engaged and empowered to set the quality agenda for their clinical microsystem and provide a forum to change care delivery. Design should consider inherent professional motivations revealed by thematic analysis including desire to participate in systematic quality improvement, interprofessional respect, and cross‐discipline collaboration