Team-based care
Non-physician health care workers trained to deliver high-quality routine care help clinics run smoothly and treat more patients.
Challenge
Over a billion people live with high blood pressure, but there aren’t enough physicians or nurses for the life-long routine care needed to help keep everyone’s high blood pressure controlled.
Solution
Under team-based care, health care workers such as nurses, community health workers, and pharmacists train to work together to provide quality blood pressure care in non-specialty clinics.
Impact
Health care workers trained to provide quality routine care work together to treat more patients each day and allow doctors to focus on complex cases, improving primary health care for everyone.
How team-based care saves lives
Imagine that you’re a physician in a busy clinic that serves hundreds of patients a day. You’d have only 3 or 4 minutes with each patient—time to take blood pressure, but not much else.
With team-based care, non-physician health care workers—such as nurses, community health workers, and pharmacists—take on routine but time-consuming tasks like measuring blood pressure, refilling prescriptions, counseling, and initiating treatment.
This small shift in responsibilities can make a big difference:
- More health care workers are available to see patients.
- Patients can recieve regular follow-ups at a lower level of care closer to home—like a local primary health care clinic—where specialized providers may not always be present.
- Doctors are freed up to provide supervision and to focus on complex cases.
- Clinics run more smoothly, improving outcomes for everyone seeking care, not just people living with high blood pressure
Team-based care highlights
How we support team-based care
We work with partners to make team-based care a part of their blood pressure management programs. We support:
- Simple, standardized treatment protocols, which make it possible for non-physician health care workers to safely treat uncomplicated high blood pressure.
- Training in blood pressure management for non-physicians, including on-demand training on smartphones, supportive supervision and mentoring.
- Validated digital blood pressure devices, which make it easy to take blood pressure accurately, every time.
- Digital health records that travel with the patient to any facility or doctor they choose.
- Telemedicine services so non-physician health care workers can receive real-time support from specialists when needed.
