Professional Practice Model
El Camino Health's nursing professional practice model (PPM) emphasizes the patient being at the center of all care. These are the other key components of the model:
- Caring and Family — words chosen by our nurses that reflect their practice.
- Excellence — refers to the goal to deliver the highest quality care to patients.
- Community — represents the hospital's history as a community-built organization and its future — broadening delivery of care across the continuum.
- Compassion — describes how our nurses deliver care.
- Science and Innovation — reflect our legacy as the first hospital in the world to implement an Electronic Medical Record in 1971, and our culture of supporting nursing innovation through the Nursing Research Council.
- Patient Care Team — captures the collaborative nature of care at El Camino Health.
Four key aspects of care enclose the labyrinth: Preventative, Restorative, Psychological-Spiritual, and Growth-Collaboration-Education.
“The goal of nursing care is achieving the fullest physical, emotional, intellectual, social, and spiritual functioning of the client.”
Nurses as Part of a Multidisciplinary Team
Hospital acquired pneumonia (HAP) is the most common hospital acquired infection. Out of these cases, 60% (Giuliano, Baker, Quinn 2017) are non-ventilator healthcare-associated pneumonia (NV-HAP).
To address the issue, we formed a multidisciplinary team comprised of respiratory therapists, clinical nurses, nurse managers, and quality team members to develop our NV-HAP reduction plan, known as the ICOUGH program. Since the launch of our ICOUGH program, our NV-HAP rate has decreased by 51%.
Our performance improvement efforts included appointing clinical nurses as ICOUGH champions for each unit and developing unit-based goals. Nurses ensured best practices were followed such as ambulation, making sure the head of bed is elevated at all times, and oral hygiene. Each month, top performing units are recognized with certificates of achievement for their “Out of this World Performance" and Moon Pies.
- ICOUGH
- I Incentive Spirometer
- C Cough and Deep Breathe
- O Oral Care
- U Understand (Patient Information)
- G Get Moving (Ambulation)
- H Head of Bed Elevated at ALL Times
Deidre Shin, RT
Tracy Trail-Mahan, RN
Mandi Manku, RN
Direct Care Informatics Council (DCIC)
An ongoing challenge nurses face is the burden of documenting the care they provide, while still spending quality time with their patients. To address this challenge, we formed the Direct Care Informatics Council, a collaboration between our information technology department (IT) and direct care staff. Nurses from nearly every clinical and ancillary department are represented. The council works to streamline, simplify, and standardize clinical documentation systems and processes to improve the safety, quality, and efficiency of patient care. The councils's achievements include:
- Improved clarity and simplification in order sets
- Automatically implementing nursing plans of care
- Adding options for nurses to quickly chart unchanged assessments
Council members review documentation flowsheets line by line to answer the following questions: Is this needed? Can it be optimized? The council measures its success by the reduction of clicks nurses perform in the documentation process. These clicks are reduced by thorough review and redesign of documentation flowsheets. By Spring 2022, the council saw a reduction of half of a million clicks per year.