Poster Presentation
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
9:00 AM - 9:45 AM
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
2:45 PM - 3:30 PM
How We Made It Work: The Practical Practice of Primary Nursing at the Bedside
Jaime Santos, RN, BSN, CMSRN1, Shirley A. Thomas, RN, BSN, MPA2, Mary Lee-Fong, RN, BSN, MSN1, and Melinda Breight, RN, BSN2. (1) Vascular and GI Surgery Unit, University of California Davis, Sacramento, CA, USA, (2) Vascular and GI Surgery Unit and Lift Team, University of California Davis Health System, Sacramento, CA, USA
| Learning Objective #1: Learn 2 barriers to the implementation of Primary Nursing. |
| Learning Objective #2: Learn 2 strategies for the implementation of Primary Nursing. |
Providing quality, consistent, supportive bedside care is extremely challenging and exceptionally important to a positive patient outcome, as well as the timeframe between admission and discharge, better known as length of stay. Many nursing models exist in the effort to ease the assimilation of theory into practice. However the actual process is often met with resistance from the staff secondary to it’s emotionally, physically, and intellectually taxing nature. Our unit consists of 36 acute care medical-surgical specialty beds that often are filled with a widely diverse patient population, who often in and of themselves are more emotionally, physically, and intellectually taxing.. The Primary Nursing Model was developed amongst a unit-based Primary Nursing Council consisting of all Registered Nurses with varying levels of education from the Associate level to the Masters prepared level, as well as years of experience from 2 years to over 20 years. We are all bedside nurses with a universal desire to make relationship-based care work, decrease length of stay, and to see an increase in positive patient outcome. Once we became more organized, focused and sophisticated we recognized that we were actually using the nursing process to assess, diagnose, plan, implement and evaluate the assimilation of primary nursing into the mainstream nursing practice on our unit. We used a holistic approach in our implementation of primary nursing, with a strong focus on the emotional and the intellectual integrity of our nurses. Once we laid the foundation, we got the physicians on board. We already had good communication with ancillary members, including the PT department, occupational therapy, social services, clinical nurse specialists, utilization review and the discharge planning department. Our unit came to the conclusion that we were practicing Primary Nursing all along, the resistance and intimidation ultimately came from the resistance to change.