One Stop Post Op Model of Care
The Heart Center of Greater Waterbury is the first advanced cardiac care program in Connecticut to use the One-Stop Post Op model of care.
Similar to the model often used now in maternity wards, where an expectant mother goes through labor, delivery and recovery in the same room, One-Stop Post Op improves a patient's care and experience by eliminating multiple room transfers.
In this model for cardiac care, One-Stop Post Op means that from admission to discharge, with the exception of surgical procedures, a patient is in the same bed in the same room, rather than being moved to two or three different rooms, as his or her recovery progresses. Patient rooms are private with their own bathroom and places to store personal items. They are clustered together to streamline staffing and equipment requirements.
In other cardiac programs, a cardiac patient spends some amount of time in an Intensive Care Unit after a procedure. When a patient's condition improves, he or she is moved to a step-down unit where there is closer monitoring than on a general patient floor, but not as much as in the ICU. Following the step-down unit, a patient could be moved to a general floor.
Until recently, no one considered outfitting a single room, or its unit, with the equipment and staffing necessary to meet the needs of a cardiac patient throughout his or her stay in a hospital. Instead, hospitals use centralized locations designed to meet the needs of each phase of recovery. For instance, ICUs were developed to care for the most critically ill patients, including those in the very challenging first hours after an operation, no matter what kind of operation it was.
At the Heart Center of Greater Waterbury campuses, we use the One-Stop Post Op model because it gives a patient more consistent access to the hospital's highly trained cardiac staff working together in the same place.
How does One-Stop Post Op improve patient care?
The training requirements are very different for cardiac nurses in the ICU and cardiac nurses in step-down units. There could be delays in treating complications that might develop in a traditional step-down unit. With the One-Stop Post Op model of care, those variations in staff training are eliminated and treatment can be delivered more quickly.
How does One-Stop Post Op improve patient outcomes?
Patients in cardiac programs with One-Stop Post Op experience faster intervention for complications and have been shown to have shorter hospital stays, sometimes more than one day less, than those using the traditional model.
