Wound Care and Hyperbaric Medicine Team Improves Safety, Efficiency and Standards of Care

By Jo Comaris, RN, BSN

Improving patient safety, efficiency and standards of care have been the focus of the Wound Care and Hyperbaric Medicine team over the past year.

We have implemented case reviews on all patients who have been seen in our clinic for more than 90 days with the aim to provide the highest standard of care for these patients by assessing their progress and the need for any further interventions. Laura Chambers, RN, WOCN, BSN, and Krista Kaufman, RN, WOCN, BSN led these reviews.

We are grateful to AdventHealth for helping advance the education of our wound, ostomy, continence (WOCN) nurses through a year-long educational and mentoring process at Emory University followed by National Board Testing.

Inspired by the Global Leadership Conference, our team members have recently focused on increasing our efficiency and improving our teamwork. As a result, we have improved our workplace environment by decreasing clutter, purging the office of unnecessary and outdated material, organizing, consolidating nursing team workplaces into one room for better efficiency, and streamlining processes and communication between all team members. Surveys of our wound care patients have consistently shown that wait times are an issue in our clinic. We found that one major reason for this is attempting to fit in late arrivals, which results in backups in the waiting room and negatively impacts those who arrive on time. We have recently addressed this issue by examining the culture of non-compliant patients (those who choose consistently to arrive late to their appointments). As a result, we have instituted a grace period for appointment arrival – and if a patient arrives outside of this grace period, they have the option to reschedule their appointment for the next morning or at a later date. This change has resulted in increased efficiency in the clinic and happier attitudes for patients and team members.

At Wound Care and Hyperbaric Medicine, we are living out the goal to be “Greater As a Whole” daily with this kind of attention to patient safety, efficiency and standards of care.