November 2003
 Good Samaritan Taps
Community Partners to Raise Career Ladder
How successful has Baltimore’s Good Samaritan Hospital
been in establishing a “foundation of learning” as the
organization’s underlying culture? Remarkably so, judging by Director of
Professional Development Stacey Brull’s use of “phones ringing off
the hook” and “snowball effect” in describing the past
year’s progress toward this goal.
Good Samaritan’s expanded emphasis on education as the
path to greater patient satisfaction and increased quality of care has taken
the form of a career ladder for professional nursing. The structure has two
main components. The first consists of education programs offered
on-site—for staff and community residents who want to begin a nursing
career by training as a clinical nursing assistant (CNA), and an RN-to-BSN
program. The second is made up of two learning centers—one a clinical
simulation center, where educators demonstrate technical skills, and the other
an “e-learning” center, which is particularly important for program
participants who don’t have a computer at home.
Brull explains that the tremendous level of interest in the
CNA program leads to lots of phone calls. And, successful—and
motivated—participants can take the next step on the ladder and work
toward becoming RNs, through a program the hospital has jointly created with
Baltimore’s Coppin State College. That level of interest, along with the
enthusiasm of the RNs who are working toward their BSNs, has created the
educational snowball effect. “The impact on morale has been
tremendous,” says Brull. “Now we get calls from lab technicians and
unit secretaries asking what kind of course they can take.”
The entry-level CNA program was launched with a $55,444
grant from the Baltimore-based Abell Foundation, which supports innovative
programs in local schools, hospitals, and human service agencies that reach out
to the disadvantaged. While both foundation and hospital staff are delighted by
the enthusiastic response to the program (and to the subsequent addition of the
RN component), Brull offers a cautionary note to those thinking of creating a
similar effort: “It’s a very labor-intensive process with a number of
obstacles that may not be recognized in the initial planning.”
She explains that these range from the challenge of clearing
Tuesdays for classes when CNAs typically work five weekdays, to the need to
refresh English and math skills when most participants graduated from high
school 10 or 15 years ago. In addition, purchasing several hundred
dollars’ worth of books can be difficult for CNAs. “Buying their
books might take a third of their paycheck, while they also have to feed their
families,” notes Brull.
So far, there have been 45 participants in the CNA program,
and 25 of these have started in the RN program. Good Samaritan is taking a
breather and not accepting new candidates this fall, as the program’s ups
and downs get hammered out. “We’ve learned a lot from the challenges
of the pilot group; the next round will be easier, since we’ll have a
better idea of what is needed for success, ” Brull says.
That is not to say that Good Samaritan isn’t currently
moving forward on other educational fronts. In response to LPNs asking for a
program, the hospital is now designing an LPN-to-RN program. “That’s
a little more difficult than the RN-to-BSN program,” says Brull. “But
with strong support from my nursing education department, we’re working on
it.”
Contact:
Stacey Brull
Director of Professional
Development
Good Samaritan Hospital
Phone: 410-532-4758
E-mail:
Stacey.brull@medstar.net (Back to the top)
 With Help from the National Youth
Leadership Forum, St. Mary's Helps High School Students Explore Health Care
Careers
For the past two summers Pat Piepoli, a clinical recruiter
for St. Mary’s Hospital in rural Leonardtown, has coordinated a day-long
visit that covers six hospital departments for a group of high school students
from across the country. Why? After all, it takes quite a bit of
behind-the-scenes work to make it happen, from getting permission from any
patients with whom students may interact to lining up things with department
leaders.
Piepoli explains why: “We do it because we think
it’s important for these students—all of whom have excellent academic
records and who have expressed an interest in a health care career—to see
medical procedures in different departments and to get a sense of patient care
in a community-focused hospital like St. Mary’s.” Piepoli notes that
80 percent of the hospital’s employees live within the southern Maryland
county for which it is named. “Often, we’re on a first-name basis
with our patients. While that close relationship can make an experience more
comfortable for them, it also keeps us on our toes—we’re likely to
get personal feedback about how they were treated here.”
The organization that brings the students to the
Baltimore-Washington area for ten days (and that arranges their health
care-related visits to a wide range of hospitals, research facilities, and
medical schools) is the National Youth Leadership Forum on Medicine—
NYLF/MED. Founded in 1992, the forum’s mission is to give young people a
real-life taste of the diverse areas that make up a medical career, as well as
exposure to the evolving ethical and legal issues in the field. The program
also explains the clinical practice and educational requirements for entering
various medical professions. (NYLF conducts similar programs to introduce
students to other professions as well, from law and diplomacy, to anthropology
and engineering.)
Piepoli notes that many of the students start out wanting to
be doctors. Several who visited St. Mary’s expressed a serious interest in
becoming surgeons and were allowed to witness a surgical procedure. She notes,
however, that the experience may have an unintended result. “Sometimes
going into the OR and seeing an operation can change their minds; they may end
up pursuing a different medical career.”
While leadership forum staff have just begun tracking how
many students in the medical forum go on to health care careers, the
program’s D.C. director Victor Hall notes that of the 16 advisors who
supervised NYLF/MED students last summer, five were program alumni now in
medical school.
Piepoli says that while preparing for the students’
visit does take careful planning, they are wonderfully appreciative and
enthusiastic about the experience. At St. Mary’s, students visited the
emergency department, peri-operative, (“We give them a certain spot to
stand in; if a procedure gets too overwhelming, they can either sit down or
leave the room”), radiology, laboratory, respiratory therapy, and
rehabilitation medicine. The attention to detail in setting it all up is worth
it, she says, when the hospital receives the students’ evaluation
comments—she cites an example from last summer: “Everyone was so kind
and answered all our questions. They have such passion for their jobs, and
confidence, too.”
With such positive responses, would it be so surprising if
someday one of the visiting students returns as a health professional?
Contacts:
Pat Piepoli
Recruiter
St.
Mary’s Hospital
Phone: 301-475-7003
E-mail:
Pat_Piepoli@smhwecare.com
Web Site SMHWECARE.
COM
Victor Hall
Program Director, Washington DC
National
Youth Leadership Forum
Phone: 202/777-4096
E-mail: vhall@nylf.org (Back to the top)
 “Beam my voice
up, Scotty” . . . Hands-free, Wireless Communication Comes to the Bedside
at St. Agnes
The new wireless communication system now in the pilot stage
at St. Agnes HealthCare in Baltimore does have a Star Trek quality about it:
While not quite as sophisticated as the futuristic technology behind
“Beam me up, Scotty,” the system does allow a staff member’s
voice to be beamed instantly anywhere in the hospital just by talking to it.
“It is a badge that can either be clipped to a shirt
pocket or worn as a pendant around the neck. By pressing a button on the badge,
a nurse can continue to work at the bedside and simply ask the system to call a
person by giving a name, title, or function. If the person is on campus,
communication is immediate. (The system is supported by the wireless
infrastructure St. Agnes put in place to enable this and other forms of
wireless communications.)
The technology application’s full name is Vocera
Communications System. The California-based company that makes it was founded
just three years ago.
Nurses are the staff members most excited about the
system’s potential, says John Welby, the hospital’s marketing and
public relations manager. The hands-free system makes delivering patient care
more efficient than having to wait for an answer from a paged physician or
using the overhead speaker to ask another department to call the nursing
station. “This wireless communication marks a significant advance in how
we care for our patients,” notes Kathi Diver, nurse manager of the pilot
medical–surgical unit. “We can attend to patients more quickly and
with fewer interruptions. And, because it allows nurses to spend more time at
the bedside, it has the potential to improve both quality of care and patient
satisfaction.” The system also lowers the frustration level of nurses who
previously had to spend time tracking down staff when they had a
patient-related question, she concludes.
Contact:
John Welby
Marketing and Public
Relations Manager
St. Agnes HealthCare
Phone: 410/368-2144
E-mail:
JWELBY@STAGNES.ORG (Back to the top)
 The “Grow Your Own”
Approach Means Mercy Medical Center Didn't Have to Look Far to Find PET Scanner
Technologists
As vice president for operations and nuclear medicine
supervisor respectively, Bryan Fick and Pat Novak knew they were faced with two
big workforce challenges last year as Mercy Medical Center acquired PET scanner
technology to enhance its diagnostic capabilities. The first was finding scarce
PET-trained technologists to perform and analyze the scans. The second was
keeping current staff from leaving during the stressful period when, beyond
building a suite for the scanner, the entire department was renovated.
The Fick-Novak team succeeded on both counts, through
creative approaches to recruitment and retention. Mercy Medical Center
now has three PET-trained technologists in place, with a fourth in training.
And no one left during the several-months’ construction process, which put
increased demands on staff as they worked to maintain a consistent level of
patient care among shifting office locations and other disruptions.
Fick explains that he and Novak, with strong support from J.
T. Salkeld, M.D., the department’s medical director, employed a wide range
of techniques to achieve their staffing goals. First, they didn’t have to
recruit for PET scanner technologists at all, at least not externally. Instead,
after a market assessment, the medical center offered a 5 percent differential
for the position—which motivated several current staff members to become
PET proficient. (The same market review resulted in a salary adjustment for a
number of the center’s current nuclear medicine technologists as well.)
In addition, the center relieved its nuclear medicine
technologists of a number of routine tasks by creating a new nuclear medicine
assistant position. Now two people hired from the outside do recordkeeping,
develop film, and provide support for patients during the scanning process.
And in his role as medical director, Dr. Salkeld made full
use of the range of employee recognition tools available at Mercy. These
included small monetary rewards for a job particularly well done; a number of
surprise breakfasts and lunches; and almost daily verbal acknowledgement of
some aspect of staff’s flexibility and dedication to patient care during
the construction process. That level of attention to employee morale isn’t
surprising, explains Fick, because the medical center is under the sponsorship
of the Sisters of Mercy. “A hallmark of the Sisters of Mercy management
approach is to recognize an institution’s responsibility to care for its
employees,” he explains.
Now things are running smoothly in Mercy’s Nuclear
Medicine Department, with patients and their physicians taking advantage of the
benefits of PET technology. These include the reduced need for invasive
diagnostic surgery and more accurate staging of cancers. That has been the goal
of the entire process—although it’s a little easier to see, now that
the dust has settled.
Contacts:
Bryan Fick
Vice President for
Operations
Mercy Medical Center
Phone: 410/332-9648
E-mail:
bfick@mercymed.com
Pat Novak
Nuclear Medicine Supervisor
Mercy
Medical Center
Phone: 410/332-9177
E-mail: pnovak@mercymed.com
(Back to the
top)
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