At the end of the day, you can preach all the nursing best practices in the world and even be held to account to employ those best practices, but if your patients are not showing an improved outcome you’ve somehow missed the mark. Keeping just 5 key pillars of the program in the line of site is more reasonable for both management and staff. It limits overlap between goals and draws a clearer connection to the measurement of those improvements.

Once these concepts have been converted into actionable plans for a specific organization, the necessary tools must be implemented which will provide the recording of data necessary to attain and re-designate your recognition as a Magnet organization. Empirical evidence is, by nature derived through observations, but if these observations are not being systematically captured, you lack real proof points. For this, the creation of a Professional Nurse Database is a must. A set of tools which can help to develop, evaluate and provide empirical evidence of your progress on any number of goals.

A big part of such a system is easy access to education to help staff to maintain compliance or advance their career. The evidence here is in the form of a transcript. It also requires a mechanism to demonstrate clinical performance such as with the use of checklists. Using evaluations provides a clear line of communication and feedback by managers help to encourage developmental action on the part of their nurses. The final piece is the culmination of this entire competency picture which has been created, also known as the portfolio. For the institution, if the individual nurse has been maintaining their portfolio, not only can you pick and choose very specific mufti-dimensional metrics to report on, but when it comes time to submit your nurse demographics information form to the ANCC, the work has already been done.

Read more on the 5 Magnet components in this article.

To learn more about competency management and a Nurse Database, contact Decision Critical.

800.794.1770

DecisionCritical.com

Jenny Delk-Fikes, BSN, RN-BC, Midland’s Clinical Excellence Manager and her team spoke with us regarding how they used the Decision Critical suite of competency management tools to achieve their Pathway designation and how they are the same tools which will also be utilized as they head on their Magnet journey as well.

Gain a glimpse into the conference and official posters which exemplify this year’s class of Pathway designees.

The term “portfolio” typically refers to an assembly of your best stuff. Your financial portfolio is collection of carefully selected investment vehicles which are designed to best define your financial value. When it comes to your career, a portfolio can be used to represent a selection of elements which best define your professional value. Your overall competency. An artist, designer or photographer creates a binder they show to new clients or hiring managers as a representation of their craft. This is pretty straight forward for professions where the aesthetic value of your work is what defines you. When it comes to a field such as nursing however, the competency picture is a little more difficult to capture and express.

Here, you are dealing with a lot of continuing education courses which need to be completed for compliance or for advancement. You have your professional license and healthcare certifications which must be kept up to date and presented to those who ask. You also have the checklists which were completed by your preceptors, or evaluations written by your managers which can both weigh heavily when illustrating how well you demonstrate your skills in practice. All this, even before you consider your experience, degrees and other items found in a traditional resume. Before long, the static resume you keep in Microsoft Word is no match for all of the competency indicators you have worked so hard to acquire. Why sell yourself short?

The good news is that with the development of cloud computing, along with the ever increasing number of devices available to connect you, there is no better time to leave your Word file behind. Decision Critical has been a software as a service (SaaS) provider since 1999 and has become a leader in the healthcare space for competency management tools, including the online portfolio. The full suite of tools help institutions to pull together course transcripts, evaluations, completed checklists, resumes, reflections and more on their people. This can all be used to gain a complete competency picture of their staff and to deliver compliance reporting.

Individual nurses have access to a powerful online application which lets them capture and store their entire life’s body of work, much of which can even be auto-populated. When it comes time to show their wares, they can easily select the key indicators they want to include in a custom view and send it to the audience of their choosing. The nurse owns all of their information which can be taken when they graduate from school or move up the ladder over the span of their career. It has never been easier to show the world what you have to offer.

Nurses were never asked to shoulder these extra responsibilities within the healthcare process. The needs arose and they responded. Be that as it may, these expanded tasks are beginning to shed more light on the question of competency.

Competency management is the buzz phrase, but between organizations there seems to be very different perspectives on what exactly it entails and how to measure it. Ten years ago, the Learning Management System (LMS) was considered to be the primary tool for keeping a nursing staff competent. Hospitals would typically require a minimum level of coursework to meet government compliance, but stopped right there. Today, with the expanded role that nurses play, your competency management strategy needs to have a lot more than just an LMS. A regular evaluation of the hands-on delivery of care needs to be part of the review process. The only challenge is that it can’t take a significant burden of time and effort to capture it.  Think tablets and smartphones.

Portfolios need to play a bigger role in the competency process as well. They are the portal into the competency picture of each and every individual and should be regularly updated with as much automation as possible. A nurse’s latest transcripts, their evaluations, completed checklists, patient stories and even certifications can populate automatically as they are earned, making it even easier to have the most up to date portfolio as possible.

When you can bring these elements together into one place, summarized in a clean dashboard of easy to understand ratings, the competency picture for an individual nurse or the entire organization is always at hand.

Here’s a thought.

How about we encourage doctors to create portfolios the same way that nurses and other healthcare professionals do? This is a curriculum vitae, licenses, certifications, committees, presentations, published works and any number of scanned documentation which supports a doctor’s credentials. All of this information can now be collected, organized and stored securely online with an electronic portfolio.

Using the Decision Critical portfolio tools for instance, a doctor could maintain all of their key accomplishments and documentation and then select which pieces of this information will make it onto their patient or CMS-facing pages.

Consumers could then compare the quantitative information between doctors, as well as the more qualitative elements such as reflections from patient’s and those written by the doctors themselves. As the CMS continues to determine the best manner through which to rate physician and facility performance, online portfolios should be at the top of their consideration list.

LEARN MORE

Once you install the plug-in software for your browser, you are good to go. The name of the game is to jump over all of the obstacles that come your way as you rush on a code call through the hospital hallways. Of course, you can’t pass onto the next level of excitement until you take a squirt of hand sanitizer from the dispenser on the wall. How’s that for a nice little reminder to get compliant on your “How to reduce the transmission of viruses” online course.

It is not entirely clear as to whether J&J has a lock on a vision of tying something like this into compliance training, but it may not be a bad idea. How about requiring that the game player link out to the compliance course on the appropriate topic before they get to move to the next level. Something like, “Clean hands are a must! Before you pass to the next level you need to answer the following 10 questions on proper hand sanitizing techniques.”. Just a thought.

This may take the idea of creating entertaining compliance training courses just a little bit over the curve, but at least it would help hospital educators to keep their teams up to date and compliant.

It may be a while before healthcare’s first gaming LMS is released, in the meantime, have a look at the Decision Critical LMS solution, which lets you assign and remind your entire team when their compliance courses are due.

Read the Article

This report from the Institute of Medicine discusses the future of nursing and how education needs to be a key focus.

READ THE REPORT

What successful experience have you had in administering this kind of ongoing training and evaluation?

This article from NurseZone.com offers recommendations for nurses to help avoid the most common errors.

SOURCE: NurseZone.com

AUTHOR: Debra Wood, RN

http://www.nursezone.com/Nursing-News-Events/more-news/How-to-Avoid-the-Most-Common-Nursing-Errors-Affecting-Patient-Safety_36542.aspx

Here are some of the tracks for the conference:

• Care Delivery and Sustainability
• The Impact of Health Care Reform Policy
• Leading for the Future
• Patient Safety and Quality
• Leveraging Technology

Please join us for some champagne and networking with nursing’s national and international leaders.

If you would like to meet with us while at the conference, please submit your contact information using the form in the right sidebar.