SAN DIEGO, CA – Red State Regional Chief Nursing Officer, Dolly McGuire, took 10 minutes at the end of one of last week’s Daily Operations Meetings to note the dramatic improvement in nurse satisfaction scores for the Neurosciences Unit and its new manager, Clay DeWitt.
In the ensuing discussion the hospital leadership team parsed the results of the survey and it was determined that the main driver for the improvement was the fact that DeWitt told his nurses on day one that he had no issue whatsoever with falls as long as there were no resulting injuries associated.
“Call, Don’t Fall” signs had been removed and, in what McGuire deemed a shining example of multidisciplinary approach, DeWitt enlisted the help of the Physical Therapy Department to develop a training tool to teach patients techniques on how to protect themselves during their descent to the floor. Director of Service Excellence, Heidi Monroe, was also quick to note that, while the number of falls on the unit did indeed triple, the number of call light bells was cut in half and the quality of life for Nurses, Patient Care Technicians, and Unit Secretaries received a much-needed boost as a result.
In a moment of insight, McGuire quickly formed a task force to investigate the possibility of green-lighting the presence of hospital-acquired pressure ulcers as long as they were not “the really, really bad ones.”
