Jan. 8, 2010
Quality care at the bedside
In its “Focus on TCAB (Transforming Care at the Bedside)” issue, published in November, the American Journal of Nursing looked at how UPMC nurses continue to raise the bar in patient care.
UPMC piloted the TCAB quality care initiative at UPMC Shadyside in 2003 with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Institute of Health Care Improvement. This innovative program since has expanded to several clinical sites within UPMC, and to the UPMC Shadyside School of Nursing.
UPMC initiatives are featured in four articles in the issue:
- In “Transporting Telemetry Patients,” Nancy Mayer, MBA, BSN, RN, unit director of the 3B step-down unit at UPMC St. Margaret, showed how staff nurses on the unit pinpointed challenges of immediate importance and helped create a new algorithm to evaluate low-acuity telemetry patients for off-monitor transport. Telemetry units across UPMC have adopted this algorithm.
- In “A Pod Design for Nursing Assignments,” Lisa Donahue, DrNP, RN, director of Inpatient Quality and Innovation at UPMC Shadyside, described how dividing a 38-bed cardiothoracic and vascular surgery unit into four “pods” — with two nurses assigned to each pod during each shift — resulted in consistent, sustained patient satisfaction scores.
- In “Trustees View TCAB from a Business Perspective,” author Laurie Lewis described how board members view the bottom-line benefits of TCAB, citing the observations of Mark Laskow, Shadyside Hospital Foundation board president, and member of the UPMC board of directors. Mr. Laskow states that through TCAB work, nurses develop greater overall career satisfaction, leading to considerable cost savings for hospitals.
- In “TCAB in the Curriculum,” Deborah Struth, MSN, RN, associate director, UPMC Shadyside School of Nursing, discusses the importance of forging a strong partnership between TCAB practice and nursing education by developing teaching and learning activities for the nursing education program, with the goal of introducing TCAB concepts early and reinforcing them throughout the program.
To learn more about TCAB and other quality initiatives throughout UPMC, visit the Donald D. Wolff Jr. Center for Quality Improvement and Innovation at UPMC site on Infonet.