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Transformational Leadership
DAISY Awards
The international DAISY Awards for Extraordinary Nurses acknowledge nurses who meet and exceed patient and family needs and expectations by displaying exceptional clinical skills, compassion, respect and partnership . ChristianaCare’s Professional Nurse Council selects ChristianaCare awardees from patient, family and colleague nominations. Congratulations to our FY2022 DAISY
Award recipients (left to right, top to bottom below) .
Rougui Barry, BSN, RN
4W Surgical, Wilmington Campus
Meredith Farone, BSN, RN
William J. Holloway Community Program
Boyd Fleming, BSN, RN
2C Surgical Unit
Laura Giannini, BSN, RN
Emergency Department, Newark Campus
Louie Gutierrez, ADN, RN
6S Stepdown Unit, Wilmington Campus
Lauren Hayes, MSN, RN-BC
Surgical Critical Care Complex
Angel Johnson, BSN, RN, SCRN
Neuro Critical Care Unit, Newark Campus
Tori Mathias, BSN, RN
Cardiovascular Critical Care Complex
Andrea (Andie) Welch, BSN, RN
Unit 7E Spine & Joint Replacement Center, Newark Campus
Brittany Wynne, BSN, RN
Medical Intensive Care Unit, Newark Campus
2021 DAISY Lifetime Achievement Award
Denise Lyons, DNP, APRN, AGCNS-BC, LSSBB Manager, We Improve Senior Health program
2021 DAISY TEAM Award
Medical Intensive Care Unit
Magnet Nurse of the Year® & Dot Fowler Award
This year, ChristianaCare’s Magnet Nurse of the Year is Ellen Alvarez, MEd, BSN, RN, CCRN, WTA-C. Alvarez is an RN IV in the Medical Intensive Care Unit (MICU), chair of the Education, Development, and Advancement professional governance council and a certified Wound Treatment Associate . Her work leading HAPI reduction in the MICU has resulted in improved patient outcomes and cost savings for ChristianaCare. Alvarez also received the 2022 Dot Fowler Award, which is given annually to an exemplary RN III or RN IV who demonstrates commitment to excellence in their practice area .
Excellence in Nursing Awards
The annual Excellence in Nursing Awards spotlight exceptional ChristianaCare nurses . For the first time since 2019, ChristianaCare celebrated the awards with events for recipients on all our campuses. In total, 100 nurses received awards.
Beacon Award
Our Newark Campus’s Medical Intensive Care Unit earned its fifth consecutive Beacon Award for Excellence from the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses . The award is the highest achievement in critical care nursing . The unit was Delaware’s first Beacon Award–winning unit, and it holds the most Beacon Awards statewide. It is also the only unit nationwide to earn five consecutive Beacon awards .
Of the six Beacon Award–winning patient care units currently in the state of Delaware, five are at ChristianaCare: Transitional Medical Unit (silver); Surgical Critical Care Complex (silver); Transitional Surgical Unit (silver); and the Cardiovascular Critical Care Complex (three-time gold winner) and the MICU .
“Meaningful recognition takes on even greater relevance and importance as we continue to meet the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Being recognized as a Beacon unit underscores these teams’ ongoing commitment to providing safe, patient-centered and evidence-based care to patients and families. This achievement is a tremendous honor to those who have worked so hard to achieve excellence in patient care and positive patient outcomes.”
— AACN President Beth Wathen, MSN, RN, CCRN-K
Scoring high on Healthgrades
Thanks in part to nursing’s love and excellence, ChristianaCare earned its second consecutive Healthgrades America’s 50 Best Hospitals Award™ — making us among the top 1% of more than 4,500 hospitals nationwide with year-over-year superior clinical performance.
National and regional nursing-specific awards
Sharon Anderson, MS, RN, FACHE, chief virtual health officer for ChristianaCare, was honored with a 2021 Lifetime Achievement Award from the New Castle County Chamber of Commerce. Danielle Altares Sarik, Ph.D., APRN, CPNP-PC, was appointed to the Institute of Pediatric Nursing Committee and selected as a 2021/2022 Fellow for the George Washington University Center for Health Policy and Media Engagement . Evalyne Mwangi, MSN, RN, PCCN, clinical nurse III on our Newark Campus, received the Association of Critical Care Nurses Circle of Excellence Award .
Development support
Nursing: the best cause ever
The Junior Board of ChristianaCare has a long-standing relationship with the health system. In 2022, the Junior Board chose “Celebrate Nurses” for its 2022 Nursing Innovations Junior Board Cause and gave a generous grant for ChristianaCare’s new Integrative Care Program . The gift helps us provide resources, support and education to our nurse caregivers. Junior Board members presented the $82,000 gift in June to Danielle Weber, chief nursing officer; Stacy Noel, nursing integrative care manager; Maria Brown, nursing excellence manager; and Paige Merring, nursing excellence manager .
The Junior Board also awarded a $25,000 grant to nursing’s Patient & Family Health Education team to create a Health Literacy Consumer Campaign designed to grow health literacy among consumers . Among the elements of the campaign are simple, friendly educational health literacy messages developed with patients and posters in Spanish and English placed throughout the health system to encourage questions.
New Knowledge, Innovations and Improvements
ChristianaCare caregivers at all levels and in all service areas nurture and contribute to a culture that values new knowledge, innovation and improvement . We never rest on our laurels. Rather, we always strive to contribute to advances in health care and the science of nursing that will improve patient and caregiver experiences, community health and wellbeing and the future of our profession.
We’ve got Moxi!
ChristianaCare welcomed a new player to our nursing team: Moxi, the collaborative robot, or “cobot.” We are the first health system in the Philadelphia region piloting cobots, which perform deliveries and simple tasks so that nurses and other clinical staff have more time for what they do best: caring for patients. A landmark $1.5 million grant from the American Nurses Foundation — the largest single grant in the history of Nursing at ChristianaCare — will enable ChristianaCare to deploy a total five Moxi cobots at Christiana Hospital to 11 inpatient units. The foundation grant will also support ChristianaCare research that studies the impact of cobots on nursing practice, with the goal of scaling the technology if successful .
Our Moxi pilot launched in early 2022 with two cobots funded through the generosity of donors, including Good Samaritan, Inc. and E.J. “Woody” Rice.
In our Moxi pilot’s first ten weeks, the two cobots have, in total:
• completed 2,743 deliveries. • worked 20 hours each day. • returned 912 hours back to caregivers to spend on patient care.
Advancing evidence-based practice
The nurse scientist is in
ChristianaCare’s nurse scientists are eager to share their expertise with nursing caregivers interested in developing rigorous research projects and advancing an evidence-based practice. In FY 22, they began offering 1:1 office hours to support caregivers with research, evidence-based practice and scholarly activities.
Purpose-driven posters
For the first time this year, ChristianaCare’s Nurse Residents are applying the Johns Hopkins Nursing Evidence-based Care Practice (EBP) model to ask and answer importance questions about their practice. Residents selected an area of their practice to explore how it aligns with EBP recommendations and created posters highlighting their questions, identifying elements of EBP, summarizing literature on the issue and sharing any recommendations based on their comparative review. A total of 16 completed projects were submitted (150 residents between all 16 projects were involved). Projects included topics such as Alarm Fatigue, Premature Infant Retinopathy, Staffing Ratio Impact on Nurse Burnout and Caregiver Resources to Support Patients with Autism .
Preventing Osteoporosis — A nurse-led Lean Six Sigma Healthcare Greenbelt project
Angela Godek, MSN, RN, ONC, wanted to improve the percentage of women following through on dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry test (DXA), critical to helping prevent osteoporosis, at one of the ChristianaCare Primary Care practices . She developed and implemented a replicable education program for providers and timely education and outreach protocol for patients, improving the rate of noncompliance for the bone density tests from 67% to 36%, improving both potential patient outcomes and cost of poor quality (COPQ).
MatrixCare makes excellent care more efficient
ChristianaCare caregivers are enjoying more streamlined record keeping thanks to the agency’s new electronic health record system: MatrixCare. An interdisciplinary team of HomeHealth caregivers drove a rigorous planning and implementation process for an October go-live of the system. MatrixCare integrates with all HomeHealth platforms and is available to caregivers on iPads furnished by HomeHealth. Easy to use, the platform swiftly syncs information from iPads to office, a major improvement over the old system, and gives caregivers simultaneous access to their own and patients’ schedules for real-time, conflictfree scheduling .
Nurse-led research
ChristianaCare HomeHealth’s nationally recognized Home Care Coach™ is improving patient engagement and reducing rehospitalization rates, says new research by HomeHealth caregivers Bonnie Chauvot, LPN, Terry Gonzon, Argenette Harper, Mindy Hope, Ann Painter, MSN, RN, Pam Szczerba, PT, MPT, COS-C, Lindsay Thompson, PT, and Denise Woods, MSM, PT, COS-C. Their recent research aimed at understanding the benefits of using the Alexa Skill based, voice-driven tool with HomeHealth patients found most patients using Home Care Coach™ believed it helpful in understanding and following their care plan. Additionally, HomeHealth saw a 60% decrease in emergency department and/or urgent care visits, a 58% decrease in 30-day rehospitalization rates and a 31% improvement in adherence to prescribed medications for patients using Home Care Coach™.
ChristianaCare nurse-led conferences
In FY 22, ChristianaCare’s APRN Council hosted two pharmacology conferences, one in September 2021 and one in April 2022. Both virtual, the events were designed for physicians, pharmacists, psychologists, physician assistants, nurses and nurse practitioners within the ChristianaCare system . Topics covered included addiction medicine, new pharmacological best practices for various clinical conditions and more to encourage evidence-based, guideline-driven care and practice .
Publications and presentations
Publications
Kristen Allen. (2022, March, April, May). “What I Have Learned as a New HIV Primary Care Nurse.” DNA Reporter 47(2): 5. Karen Allicock, Danielle Coyne, Anna Garton, Erin Hare and Maureen Seckel. (2021, October). “Awake Self-Prone Positioning: Implementation During the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Critical Care Nurse 41(5): 23–33. Susan Birkhoff, Cynthia Waddington, Jordan William, Leslie Verucci, Maureen Dominelli and Richard Caplan. (2021, July). “The Effects of Virtual Reality on Anxiety and Self-Efficacy Among Patients with Cancer: A Pilot Study.” Oncology Nursing Forum 48(4): 431–39. Susan Birkhoff, Julie McCulloh Nair, Kelly Bald, Tracey Frankum, Sophie Sanchez and Alicia Salvatore. (2021, April–June). “Facilitators and Challenges in the Adoption of a Virtual Nurse Visit in the Home Health Setting.” Home Health Services Quarterly 40(2): 105–20. Lindsey Bloom and Maureen Seckel. (2022, March). “Placement of Nasogastric Feeding Tube and Postinsertion Care Review.” AACN Advanced Critical Care 33(1): 68–84.
