How Does Your Healthcare Organization Shape Up re: Nurse-Led Innovation? | Confident Voices in HealthcareConfident Voices in Healthcare
If you are a nurse on the front line you know that you and your colleagues have creative ideas for identifying and solving problems in care delivery. You also know that your ideas would both improve quality and cost-effectiveness of care. Now there is evidence that supports this important reality. Get a glimpse of this progressive report below and consider sharing it with your peers and leaders.
“Unleashing Nurse-Led Innovation” is a new study by Karen Meador, MD, MBA, managing director and senior physician executive in The BDO Center for Healthcare Excellence & Innovation, and Antonia M. Villarruel, PhD, RN, Margaret Bond Simon Dean of Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania. that takes a close look at innovations led by nurses in the USA.
A story from the Executive Summary
When Diane Spatz PhD, RN-BC, FAAN first began working to more effectively promote breastfeeding vulnerable infants, it’s unlikely she thought of it as an act of innovation.
Yet innovating is exactly what she was doing when she turned her own extensive clinical experience as a nurse into a 10-step solution for improving the care of our most vulnerable infants starting life in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). The process developed by Spatz, PhD, RN-BC, FAAN, Professor of Perinatal Nursing and Helen M. Shearer Term Professor of Nutrition at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing and Director of the Lactation Program at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, has now been implemented in hospitals around the country and the world.
And it’s proved successful. Before implementation, the percentage of NICU infants at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia receiving human milk at discharge was about 30 percent. In 2014, six years after it was implemented, more than 86 percent of NICU infants were discharged on human milk.
Spatz, and other nurses like her, are proof that nursing innovation—unleashed through human-centered design, expanded scope of practice, advanced education and executive leadership—is already happening.
Key Findings of the Unleashing Nurse-Led Innovation Study
Do you see yourself as an innovator? I bet you are one!
What’s your idea? Want to write a blogpost about it? Do you know about Nurse Born Products created by nurse innovator, Sarah Mott? Do you know about Medical Improv? That is my claim to innovation. 🙂 Nurses are smart and caring professionals and we are changing healthcare!