Effective communication between nurses and physician teams on the internal medicine unit is crucial for high quality, safe, and efficient patient care. In our hospital of interest, a large academic health sciences centre, the physical layout of the unit, current admission process, and the presence of three separate physician teams contribute to uneven workload and communication barriers. We address this by physically co-locating each physician teams’ patients so as to facilitate physician-nurse collaboration, and more evenly distribute workload across all three teams. Based upon one year of real-world data, we developed a simulation model of inpatient flow through the internal medicine unit and determined the impact of two proposed changes: co-locating each team’s patients, and new admission rules for how patients are assigned to those teams. Under the new arrangement, each physician team would interact with roughly half the number of nurses, and nurses in turn would have fewer individual team members with whom to communicate, thereby improving effective communication and increasing time for direct patient care for both physicians and nurses.

内科内科护士和医师团队之间的有效沟通对于高质量，安全和有效的患者护理至关重要。在我们感兴趣的医院中，有一个大型的学术健康科学中心，该科室的物理布局，当前的入院流程以及三个独立的医生团队的存在，导致工作量和沟通障碍不均。我们通过物理上将每个医师团队的患者置于同一位置来解决此问题，以促进医师与护士之间的协作，并在所有三个团队中更平均地分配工作量。基于一年的真实数据，我们开发了一个模拟流经内科部门的住院病人流的模型，并确定了两个拟议变更的影响：将每个团队的患者共置一处，以及关于如何将患者分配给这些团队的新入院规则团队。