AONE Grant Aims to Transform Care Delivery
By Christina Orlovsky, senior staff writer
The American Organization of Nurse Executives (AONE) announced that it will take another step toward improving patient care through a newly awarded two-year grant, “Disseminating Transforming Care at the Bedside.”
The grant, sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, will allow the organization to further the progress made by the foundation’s original Transforming Care at the Bedside (TCAB) initiative, a collaborative effort launched in 2001 with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI). Thirteen hospitals participated in the TCAB pilot project, which focused on creating improvements in four main categories associated with medical-surgical units: safe and reliable care; vitality and teamwork; patient-centered care and value-added care processes.
The AONE grant broadens the scale of the TCAB initiative, involving 50 hospitals nationwide, which will be selected by the summer of 2007.
“What we’re doing is taking the step toward disseminating the information in a different methodology than is being used with a smaller number of hospitals,” explained Pamela Thompson, MS, RN, FAAN, chief executive officer of AONE.
“We are experimenting with identifying how to create a toolkit, processes and systems to allow more hospitals to utilize the approach,” she added. “Hospitals will work with us to take the learnings from TCAB and pull out of that work what you need to do, what kind of training you need, what kinds of resources you have to apply and, very specifically, what skills and competencies are needed to implement these changes.”
According to IHI, some of the successful interventions that came out of TCAB at some of its pilot hospitals included the use of rapid response teams, new communication models, professional support programs including preceptorships and educational opportunities, “liberalized” diet plans for patients and redesigned workspaces for efficiency and waste reduction.
Thompson asserted that the work involved in the new grant will be challenging and the organization will be looking for hospitals that are prepared to make a serious commitment to the long-term project.
“We want a broad diversity of hospitals—rural, urban, academic—but the biggest criteria will be the commitment behind the hospitals,” she said. “This is very hard work because it’s asking people to look at doing their work differently. When you’re trying to care for patients in a high acuity it’s already challenging; when you try to make significant changes to that care, you add another challenge.”
Despite the difficulty of implementing care delivery changes, Thompson concluded that the work is vital to the future of nursing and health care.
“The major goal and one of the reasons we’re doing this is that we know there is a nursing shortage and we will have much fewer nurses 10 years from now,” she said. “If we’re continuing to deliver care in 10 years the same way we are now, we’ll be in trouble. One way to leverage that is to change the way we use a smaller, well-educated workforce—not tweaking the system, but transforming it.”
For more information, visit the Web sites of AONE and IHI.
Related article:
Transforming Care at the Bedside Spurs Innovation
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