For Immediate Release
Mercy Nurse Makes Hospital Stay Safer and Receives National Accolades
Oklahoma City — Thanks to the brainchild of one Mercy
Health Center nurse, hospitals across the nation are enquiring about
Mercy’s new SafePath program—an effort to make the transfer of a patient
from one area of the hospital to another safer. Rob McEver, MS, BSN, RN,
will be recognized this month by The American Organization of Nursing
Executives (AONE)—a subsidiary of the American Hospital Association—for
thinking out of the box and creating SafePath.
“Over the past several years, hospitals have been
focusing more and more on how to make their facilities safer for
patients and no one has better insight than nurses and nurse managers
who see the inner-workings of healthcare every day,” said Linda Fanning,
MS, BSN, RN, Mercy’s interim chief nursing officer. “Hospitals
nationwide are experiencing high patient volumes and that means nurses
are stretched in every way possible. SafePath creates an extra set of
hands, an extra set of eyes. Patients are safer because of it.”
SafePath combines the duties of admission nurse,
discharge nurse and patient safety advocate. In a typical hospital
setting, non-clinical transporters move patients from one area of the
hospital to another but with SafePath, a nurse is assigned to a patient
and remains with the patient until they are safely transferred.
“The SafePath nurse is the person who makes sure all
the dots get connected,” said McEver, manager of Mercy’s
medical/surgical unit who will receive the Organizational Innovation
Nurse Manager/Director award at the AONE’s 41st annual meeting in
Seattle, Washington. “The SafePath nurse verifies physician orders,
makes sure the patient’s pain is controlled, double-checks to make sure
correct medications are administered and keeps both the patient and
family informed.”
Besides making it safer for patients, SafePath has
decreased the time it takes for patients to be admitted and discharged,
in some cases cutting the time in half. And safer transit, along with a
more efficient process, has made patients very satisfied. Mercy’s
patient satisfaction scores have soared with the new program.
“Because the SafePath nurse is focused on certain
areas of care, it allows other nurses on the units to spend more time
with their assigned patients, providing better care to all,” said
McEver.
Mercy, to date, has three SafePath nurses in
different clinical areas of the hospital and expects to expand the
program even further.
Press release dated: April 11, 2008
|
