Three Memorial Hospital nurses were recently honored for excellence in advocacy, innovation and leadership at the 31st Annual Colorado Springs Nightingale Awards ceremony at The Pinery at the Hill.
Colorado Springs Mayor John Suthers provided the keynote address by reflecting on Colorado Springs’ early history as a health mecca. Suthers thanked nurses for their dedication and commitment to caring for the sick and injured in southern Colorado. Memorial Chaplain Ruth McIntyre provided the invocation.Leighann Jock, a clinical nurse specialist in the Intensive Care Unit; Lori Enlow, a team lead for the Birth Center and Women’s Pavilion; and Stacy Appell, a charge nurse on the Cardiac Vascular Thoracic Progressive Care Unit at Memorial, were nominated for the Nightingale Award.
Leighann Jock, a clinical nurse specialist in the Intensive Care Unit; Lori Enlow, a team lead for the Birth Center and Women’s Pavilion; and Stacy Appell, a charge nurse on the Cardiac Vascular Thoracic Progressive Care Unit at Memorial, were nominated for the Nightingale Award.
The event, founded in 1985, is held to honor nurses who best exemplify the philosophy and practice of Florence Nightingale, a 19th century nursing pioneer who epitomized the art of helping people toward their optimal health.
Jock was named a Nightingale Luminary, meaning she now will be considered by a State Selection Committee for consideration of a state Nightingale Award. Forty-eight nurses will be considered from across the state; six statewide winners will be named.
“I’m honored, but I could not have been a Luminary winner had it not been for the staff in the ICU,” Jock said.
In all, six Luminaries were named Friday night. Jock was named one of them for her effort in developing an evidence-based central line bundle that addressed deficits that helped Memorial have a total of zero CLABSIs in 2015 – a phenomenal achievement.
The CLABSI bundle includes multimodal staff education, daily review of line necessity in multidisciplinary rounds and the utilization of chlorhexidine gluconate cloths to clean on and around the central lines. Jock also organized the use of improved central-line dressings to ensure insertion site care is optimized. Lastly, she instituted the use of the Prevantics Device Swab to be used before every central line access.
“The impact of hospital-acquired infections cannot be overstated. The acquisition of a CLABSI not only affects the health and well-being of our patients, it has a significant financial impact on the institution,’’ according to her nomination.
Jock said she developed the bundle after Memorial noticed an uptick in the number of CLABSI infections.
“Once we had all of the products, we began educating and re-educating, stressing that these are things that we do every single time. The staff, they knew what needed to be done because they wanted to protect their patients and the bundle has now been
fully adopted,’’ Jock said.
Enlow was a finalist for the regional Nightingale Award for decreasing the number of charges lost because of lack of documentation on non-stress tests, which cost $236.
After the hospital changed to electronic charting, Memorial discovered that there was not enough information documented for the visits to triage to be billed. When the problem was discovered, more than 200 accounts could not be billed because each visit to triage required an encounter diagnosis. There was insufficient charting to bill for non-stress tests. Enlow worked to create a system that allowed the hospital to reduce the number of charges that are dropped each month because of insufficient documentation.
Appell, a charge nurse, has helped Memorial bolster staff retention, directed unit improvements that have maintained and even improved patient satisfaction scores and inspired her staff to strive for excellent patient outcomes no matter what daily hurdles they face.