Faculty Collaborate to Improve Practice
For area hospitals and health systems striving to implement evidence-based practice (EBP) and achieve better patient outcomes, the School of Nursing's faculty serve as an excellent resource from which to draw. Since 2011, Kay Gaehle, PhD, associate professor of primary care and health systems nursing, has worked with staff nurses and clinicians at Memorial Hospital Belleville to improve and evaluate change.
"I'm an expert resource for the clinicians and staff, Gaehle said. "They identify problems or develop ideas, and I help them refine those according to research literature. Essentially, I'm doing scholarship that impacts other scholars, and the people I'm working with are truly focused on improving patients' experiences."
For example, staff realized that patients with undiagnosed sleep apnea were at high risk for post-operative respiratory depression. Nurses, clinicians, surgeons, healthcare informatics experts, and the anesthesia and sleep study departments implemented screenings to identify surgery patients who may have undiagnosed sleep apnea. Those patients are treated appropriately for optimal care during and after surgery. Patients who participated in a sleep study after recovering from surgery were indeed diagnosed with sleep apnea.
Similarly, regional health care system SSM Health approached the School two years ago, seeking to initiate an EBP project that would allow staff nurses to influence their practice. Ann Popkess, PhD, chair and associate professor of family health and community health nursing, began working with SSM nursing staff to address problems in treating alcohol users. When alcohol-using patients come into the hospital for unrelated issues, complications frequently occur due to alcohol withdrawal.
"We were able to train roughly 400 nurse educators, pharmacists, informatics specialists, nurses and approximately 100 physicians to screen patients for alcohol dependency," Popkess said. "We also developed an online training module and have trained staff and physicians."
Two SSM hospitals are now implementing a pilot of the EBP project, aiming to reduce complications, including seizures, falls and violence; and measuring outcomes.
"This is change occurring from the bottom up, because it's staff-identified," Popkess said. "Many large organizations are not designed to implement change in this way. It's a credit to SSM, because of their commitment to successfully implement this project."
