CU-MSN-2

Hospital systems across the United States are feeling the stress of the nursing shortage, and one way to address this issue was to bring back the Licensed Practical Nurse (LPN) to the bedside. During my clinical hours for NURS 640, I worked with Rick Kelley, the Administrative Nurse Manager at Grady Memorial Hospital. I was given the opportunity to create an onboarding plan for the LPN role at the hospital. When I started this project it was overwhelming, but once I began networking and meeting with the hospital units that already had implemented the LPN role the overwhelming feeling moved to excitement. From the meetings with the different leadership managers, I discovered interpersonal teams were needed for this project to be successful. Ideas were discussed amongst the teams and areas for improvement on the implementation of the LPN role were identified. By working on this project with Rick and the leadership from the pharmacy and educational units, we created a plan for moving forward. I determined what role the LPN could provide at the bedside, and educated and trained the staff on their roles. By working with the pharmacy unit, we were able to identify safety concerns in utilizing LPNs at the bedside and how the safety issues could be prevented. This project helped me to implement a plan from the start to the end and was constructive in my management growth. It showed me the importance of communication, networking and teamwork to reach the best outcome.

During my time working at Riverside Methodist Hospital on the Neuro Critical Care (NCC) unit, I was part of a team that resolved an issue regarding clinical, educational and organizational outcomes. Our team worked together to resolve a lack of communication that occurred in all three of these areas. However, we found that there was not a lack of communication but an issue with the amount of information presented to the staff through emails. As a result of working with the staff, management and members of this team, we were able to create the Talk to me Thursday platform. We determined that only one email per week was needed that highlighted the crucial information required by the staff from management and education. This led to the information reaching the staff more efficiently and eliminated the issue of excessive emails, which caused the staff problems deciphering what was critical information and what was not critical. As a result, staff morale increased because the team addressed their frustrations and fixed the communication overload problem based on what worked best for them. Secondly, this also brought more staff participation to the unit committees because the staff saw that change could occur from their ideas and wanted to be a part of the problem solving for their unit in the future. I do not believe this could have been resolved if it was not for our team successfully working with the units affected by this project.

During the NURS 515 course, the method to address the sleep delirium problem was reached in two different ways. I had never worked in a group with another individual where our work processes were different. First, this taught me a new approach to work through projects with another individual and showed how important communication and setting concrete dates for progression of a project to occur, especially when working between interprofessional teams. Secondly, working on the sleep bundle project for patients in the neuro critical care unit to help decrease delirium I learned that partnership from multiple interprofessional teams was needed to be successful. In the education department, where knowledge is lacking in this area, management and staff needed to work together to determine the best practice to implement for success. This led to management and engineering addressing the concerns that were affecting the success of utilizing the sleep bundle to decrease delirium, which was a problem in the unit.

Understanding the perspective from all individuals within a team can be difficult at times. Working on the mock ethics committee highlighted this viewpoint. Navigating through this project with multiple other leaders provided me with the opportunity to review and learn different perspectives and how to come together to formulate the best possible outcome for a scenario. Ideas were brought to the group by all participants, which allowed for the team to examine every angle of the problem before making recommendations. Working in the group and collaborating on the outcome together showed the importance of working with a team to achieve success.