Episode 120: The Art of Dividing Clinical Work: Creating Efficient, Happy Medical Teams

Welcome to the Sustainable Clinical Medicine Podcast!

In this episode, Dr. Sarah Smith is joined by Sue Peters—a healthcare improvement leader with a background in audiology and extensive experience in quality improvement for clinical teams. Sue and Sarah dive into the day-to-day challenges clinicians face, from the dreaded in-basket workload to the complexities of team communication and patient care coordination.

Together, they explore practical strategies to streamline processes, clarify roles within clinical teams, and leverage everyone's unique skills to create more efficient and sustainable practice environments. Sue shares actionable tips on offloading non-physician work, optimizing EMRs, and effectively onboarding patients—all while ensuring that both providers and patients benefit from these improvements. Plus, they chat about breaking old habits, embracing true teamwork, and even finding ways to take things out of everyone's overloaded "backpack."

Here are 3 key takeaways from this episode:

1. Embrace Team-Based Care: Don’t try to shoulder all the work alone. By clearly defining roles and empowering every member of the care team—from RNs and LPNs to MOAs—practices can improve patient access, reduce wait times, and allow clinicians to focus on what matters most.
2. Optimize Your EMR Processes: Standardizing how we populate and use EMR data not only improves patient care, but also makes it much easier to delegate and manage population health. Consistency in documentation enables actionable reporting—and lets the right team member handle the right task.
3. Involve Everyone in Change: Successful quality improvement requires all voices at the table, not just physicians. When team members participate in designing solutions, they’re more engaged, invested, and open to new ways of working.

Sue Peters Bio:

Sue Peters is a Healthcare Improvement Leader working with Primary Care and Specialty Teams to achieve true team-based care through Quality Improvement. Imagine a team where every member has a critical role in patient care and is working to top of scope, allowing you to focus on the work for which you are highly trained - It is possible.

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Would you like to view a transcript of this episode? Click here

Learn more about our guest: https://petersconsulting.ca/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sue-peters-b8661774/

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