Clinical Team Coordinator

The two Clinical Team Coordinators (CTC) support and assist the co-ordination of the weekend/evening/night shift House Officers' clinical workload. Their role is to identify at-risk patients, tasks needing completion, and the state of the hospital, as well as providing support to both medical and nursing staff during the afternoon and night shifts Monday - Friday, and all weekend.

To do this, all requests from nursing staff for House Officers need to come through the CTC who facilitates the coordination and completion of tasks in a timely manner.

Nurses on the wards are asked to discuss their clinical concerns and the need for a doctor with the CTC. The CTC, with the nurse's help, then determines the urgency of the request and the best person to complete the task.

To facilitate and coordinate the clinical workload out of hours, the CTC holds the pager numbers of the house officers. The names of the Night Team including the pager numbers of the registrars are published and faxed to the wards at 2230 hrs each night. The night team consists of the CTCs, Specialties Registrar, General Medical Registrar, Surgical Registrar, two Duty Medical, and two Duty Surgical House Officers. It is expected all staff will work as a team, in a collegial manner, especially during the after-hours periods.

• Non urgent requests are communicated by text page and are put on a list by the nursing station.
• Urgent requests are communicated by the CTC paging the appropriate doctor.

If at any time you are concerned about a patient, need assistance from the CTC, or feel that the nursing staff in the area may benefit from some assistance from the CTC, you can phone or page them as follows:

• If urgent the CTC can be contacted via switchboard on their cellphone.
• CTC Pagers - Medical CTC: 5265, Surgical CTC: 5266.

Night Team handover is at 2230 hrs in the medical seminar room between Ward 23 and AMAU. Your attendance is mandatory. This meeting identifies patients who are deteriorating or are at risk of deteriorating and discusses appropriate care planning. It also identifies areas where RMOs may need assistance during the night.

To determine and prioritise the clinical workload overnight, handover is chaired by the CTC and the following information is passed from the afternoon to the night shift:

• current status of the hospital and ED.
• any resource issues.
• seriously unwell patients.
• patients discharged from ICU.

Handover from the registrars identifies any patients of concern and outstanding patients to admit or review.

Handover from the house officers includes patients of concern and any outstanding tasks not completed during the afternoon shift.

The CTCs coordinate medical cover for the after-hours shifts and therefore all sick calls for after-hours shifts come to the CTCs. Sick calls for Mon-Friday day shifts need to go to the Resident Doctors Support Team.

Topic Code: 12482