Creating a Professional Development Plan for a Simulation Consortium

As the United States struggles with health care reform and a nursing education system that inadequately prepares students for practice, dramatic advances in educational technology signal opportunities for both academic and practicing nurses to affect our profession as never before. Simulation technologies provide large and small institutions with the means to educate health care students and novice professionals effectively and efficiently through hands-on experience, but the costs of such a venture can be prohibitive. A simulation consortium offers a venue for different health care and educational institutions with shared goals to pool knowledge, monies, and labor toward health care education throughout a geographic area. This article details one Midwestern U.S. region's work in creating a professional development plan for a new simulation consortium

Improving Safe Handoffs & Transitions from the ED to Adult Inpatient: A Response to the AHRQ Hospital Patient Safety Culture Survey

SAFE TRANSITIONS AND PATIENT HANDOFFS IN A LARGE ACUTE CARE HOSPITAL It is well documented in the literature that ineffective patient handoffs and transitions continues to be an area that can lead to adverse patient safety events so it is an urgent opportunity for a performance improvement plan. At an academic tertiary care medical center, the lowest scoring domain from the FY2017 AHRQ Patient Safety Culture Survey was patient handoffs and transitions. A team was established consisting of staff from the Emergency Department and a medical/surgical unit to develop a plan for implementing improvement interventions. Their goal was to attain a ≥ 5% improvement on the patient handoff and transitions question in the Survey by the end of 12/30/2018. A root cause analysis was initiated and resulted in a KPI being developed to collect baseline data on handoffs and transitions between the two units. After three phases to analyze and improve, several countermeasures were created. Amongst them was the development of a evidence based mnemonic handoff tool to be used within 30 minutes of patient transfer. Pulse surveys of the involved units conducted at various intervals demonstrated significant improvement of \u3e5% in the 3 teamwork questions. Next steps will be to standardize, sustain and spread the improvement methods

Community food security gaps in surveillance and monitoring

This paper describes the gaps in monitoring and surveillance identified while conducting Community Food Security assessments in three geographical areas located in south-east Queensland, Australi