Your Voice is V.I.T.A.L.!

    University Hospitals Geauga Medical Center, Chardon, Ohio

    Nov 06, 2024

    CSI Summary

    Available only to registered AACN.org users.

    CSI Presentation

    Available only to registered AACN.org users.

    CSI Toolkit

    Available only to users with a paid AACN membership.

    Added to Collection

    Project Topic:

    Improving collaboration

    Hospital, City and State:

    University Hospitals Geauga Medical Center, Chardon, Ohio

    Unit:

    • Intensive Care Unit ((ICU)
    • Stepdown Unit

    CSI Participants:

    • Ann Doerrige, BSN, RN, CCRN
    • Sarah Hanson, BSN, RN
    • Jen Pirichy, RN

    Project Goals/Objectives:

    1. Increase Healthy Work Environment Assessment Tool (HWEAT) True Collaboration scores from 3.67 to 4.04 for ICU and 2.74 to 3.03 for Stepdown unit
    2. Decrease nurse turnover rate 10%

    Project Outcomes:

    1. HWEAT True Collaborations score decreased to 3.50 for ICU, increased to 3.32 for Stepdown unit
    2. Stepdown unit increased all HWEAT standard scores and aggregate score
    3. ICU increased HWEAT standard scores in Effective Decision-Making and Authentic Leadership
    4. ICU decreased nurse turnover rate from 7% to 3.6%. Stepdown unit decreased nurse turnover from 31% to 5%
    5. Potential annual fiscal impact of $233,280

    Project Overview:

    Our goal was to increase collaboration between bedside nurses and other staff vital to the care of our patients. In 2023, our bedside nursing turnover numbers for Stepdown and ICU were seven and two nurses respectively.

    With this information, we thought creating a unit-based council would lead to an improvement in the HWEAT scores by having increased participation by staff. The hope was this would help decrease the nurse turnover rate for both units. The interventions we put in place were every six weeks we would have a unit-based council meeting with staff. In these meetings, we would go over staff concerns as well as resolutions from previous meetings. Overall, our nurse turnover rates decreased by more than 10%.

    The feedback from our project has been positive. A new branch of our project, shared governance, has now been implemented throughout the hospital. The staff in the units continue to show interest for months to come.

    Permission to Reuse Materials
    The materials associated with this AACN Clinical Scene Investigator (CSI) Academy project are the property of the participating hospital noted above, not AACN. Requests to use content contained in the CSI team’s summary, presentation or toolkit should be directed to the hospital. We suggest reaching out to the hospital’s Communications, Marketing or Nursing Education department for assistance.

    Disclaimer
    The AACN CSI Academy program supports change projects based on quality improvement methods. Although CSI teams seek to ensure linkage between their project and clinical/fiscal outcomes, data cannot be solely attributed to the project and are estimations of impact.