• Adding questions about sexual orientation, gender identity, and preferred pronouns to the intake form for new patients
• Asking patients about their backgrounds to better understand their unique health risks and challenges  
• Spreading the practice to Northwest teams specializing in mental health and addiction medicine

What can your team do:  Demographic data can include sexual orientation, gender identity, race and ethnicity, ability status, military veteran status, and language proficiency.

• Educating staff about the operational challenges caused by last-minute sick calls and encouraging them to schedule time off in advance to minimize staffing disruptions
• Hiring employees to fill staffing gaps, enabling team members to schedule time off
• Recognizing employees for outstanding attendance

What can your team do: Identify the root causes of job-related stress and burnout and work together to minimize them. Encourage employees to plan vacation and mental health days in advance and use sick days for illness.

• Having more team members work up to scope and administer evaluations  
• Scheduling appointments with members to complete the evaluations instead of making random, unscheduled calls 

What can your team do to ensure that team members work at the top of their scope to streamline care, expand options to meet patient needs, and relieve credentialed staff members of administrative tasks so they can deliver patient care?

• Earning support from top physician leaders by showcasing solid UBT wins
• Creating a suite of materials and training to help physicians understand unit-based teams and their unique roles and contributions to them
• Including information about UBTs and their role in creating an efficient practice in orientation for new doctors

• Using secure chat instead of phone calls or a voice-controlled, wearable communication device to notify nurses about non-urgent lab results
• Welcoming Emergency Department staff to the lab to meet colleagues, see processes and explain testing systems to help foster relationships and a better understanding of the work

• Identifying high-cost medications filled outside of KP pharmacies
• Developing scripting
• Reaching out to Kaiser Permanente members