Volume 27
Number 14
July 8, 2016
Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania
ELLA RYAN-MELONI:
A CALMING PRESENCE UNDER PRESSURE C o n g r a t u l a t i o n s t o t h i s y e a r ’s Maryellen Reilly Leadership Aw a r d W i n n e r ! Maryellen Reilly, former VP of Clinical and Administrative Operations who passed away in 2011, was a valued, respected, and well-loved member of the HUP community. One year after she died, HUP created a special award in her memory to recognize those who have the same profound impact as she did. This year’s winner is Ella RyanMeloni, MSN, RN, director of the Patient Flow Management Center.
INSIDE HUP's Newest Beacon Units!............................2 EVS "PRIDE" Helps Boost Ratings.............................3 What’s the Deal with E-Cigarettes?..............................3 What's Up at HUP?....................4 HUP Wins Top Marks in Stroke Status... Again!..............4 Join Team Penn for the MS Bike Tour.......................4
`` Ella Ryan-Meloni (c) with Garry Scheib (l), Diane Corrigan (r) and members of Maryellen Reilly's family.
In selecting winners for this award, HUP chooses “people who have Maryellen’s character, her management style, her personality, her commitment,” said Garry Scheib, CEO of the hospital. “Maryellen encouraged us to do just a little better every day. She saw the good in everyone. Her positive spirit had an impact on all of us, and still does, five years later.” Reilly also stressed the importance of balancing work and family, he said, but “her balance seemed to be 110 percent for HUP and 110 percent for her family.” Ryan-Meloni has many of these same qualities. She started her nursing career at HUP’s School of Nursing and never left. She progressed through the ranks, from staff nurse to assistant nurse manager and nurse manager. “She served in almost every surgical unit in the house,” Scheib said, adding that she worked with — and ‘trained’ — some of our best surgeons,” including Michael Acker, MD, chief of Cardiovascular Surgery, and cardiac surgeon Joseph Bavaria, MD, when they were residents.
In 2006, Ryan-Meloni became the first nurse leader to lend her clinical expertise to bed management. “Ella presents a calm, thoughtful action-oriented approach to daily bed management duties,” Scheib said. “She calms the waters with a rational allocation. She is unflappable despite an occupancy of greater than 90 percent… And well over 100 percent at times. And she does this with grace, enthusiasm and a primary focus on the patient.” When accepting the award, Ryan-Meloni said, “You can do so many things being a nurse here.” Scheib said the four previous winners of the Maryellen Reilly Leadership Award are Ann Costello, corporate director of Radiology; Chuck Aitken, former assistant executive Hospital Director; Darren Ebesutani, director of Supply Chain; and Mary Rogers, former nurse manager of Dulles 6, which moved to PPMC with Trauma. “That tells you a lot about the leadership award and what it means to us,” Scheib said.
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RHOADS 1, GOLD BEACON AWARD WINNER
HUP’S NEWEST BEACON UNITS! Congratulations to HUP’s three new recipients of Beacon Awards of Excellence from the American Association of Critical Care Nurses. This award recognizes units that support evidence-based practice to improve patient outcomes and exemplify excellence in professional practice and patient care. Rhoads 1, a progressive care surgical unit, received the Gold Beacon Award, the highest designation. It is the only patient-care unit in the Health System to obtain this level of recognition and one of only five “Gold” units in the state! According to the AACN website, “recipients of a Gold Beacon Award demonstrate staff-driven excellence in sustained unit performance and improved patient outcomes that exceed national benchmarks.”
interventions appear to be effective and support providing high quality and compassionate care by fostering relationships with patients and families.” Other HUP units currently holding Silver Beacon designations include the Intensive Care Nursery, the PACU, and Rhoads 7, an oncology unit. For patients and families, the Beacon Award signifies exceptional care through improved outcomes and greater overall satisfaction.
The MICU (Founders 9) received the Silver Beacon. In its executive summary, the AACN noted that “using a patient/family centered approach, the unit strives to provide the highest quality care to critically ill medical patients… Many systematic approaches have created a unit culture embedded with qualities that support collaboration, innovation and professional engagement.” Founders 12 was also awarded the Silver Beacon. According to Nicole Nolte, nurse manager of Founders 12, “We are the only non-ICU unit in Pennsylvania, Delaware or New Jersey to achieve this status!” Noting that the unit implemented many interventions to increase patient and family satisfaction, AACN feedback said, “The current
FOUNDERS 9, SILVER BEACON AWARD WINNER
“The Beacon Award signifies exceptional patient care through improved outcomes and greater overall satisfaction.”
FOUNDERS 12, SILVER BEACON AWARD WINNER 2
EVS “PRIDE” HELPS BOOSTS RATINGS A PRIDE (Professional Responsibility in Delivering Excellence) meeting is almost like a pep rally for EVS associates. It motivates — and engages — them to do what’s best for our patients… and recognizes them publicly when they succeed. The biweekly meeting is part of a rewards and recognition program, created by the Patient Experience team, that has helped Environmental Services jump a whopping 80 points in percentile rank in Press-Ganey courtesy ratings and up to the 55th percentile in HCAHPS for cleanliness in just the past four years. Christine Racobaldo, System Patient Experience manager, noted that the HCAHPS ratings for cleanliness compare hospitals from throughout the country, ranging from small community hospitals to major academic medical centers like HUP. “Among hospitals with 600+ beds, our cleanliness score is in the 80th percentile,” she said. Learning the “soft” skills of their job — focusing on voice projection, eye contact and engaging with patient, family and friends — has helped boost the courtesy scores. Previously, “staff would go into a room, clean and basically stay unnoticed. Now, employees ask to come in, introduce themselves and explain why they’re there,” Racobaldo said.
Each month, the EVS Patient Experience team sets goals for HCAHPS cleanliness for each unit. At the PRIDE meeting, unit scores are announced. The “highest scoring” and the “most improved” units receive special recognition. In addition, team leaders share letters from patients and staff that highlight members of EVS and also discuss communications and comments that offer opportunities to improve. “We want our associates to be conscious of things that need their attention and discuss ways to make them better,” said Alexis Browne, Patient Experience manager. “They are all part of the care team and have an impact on our patients in the hospital.” “We want to thank all the employees for their hard work in creating a safe environment and improving each patient’s experience through their engagement,” said Steve Gaynes, EVS resident regional director of Operations.
“The EVS team was at the 95th percentile [for courtesy]. This is an unprecedented performance and makes us one of the topperforming hospitals in the country,” said Christopher Cullom, assistant executive hospital director. “What makes this feat even greater is that this is sustained performance and not a one-time occurrence. The team is doing a phenomenal job.” The program’s rewards component provides a variety of ways staff can earn tickets, for example, for passing audits (on-the-spot quizzes or compliance checks), receiving a positive comment from a patient, family or staff member, or having perfect discharge clean rooms. Associates can then trade in their tickets for cafeteria meal tickets or a Visa gift card. `` PRIDE meetings help motivate and engage the EVS staff.
What’s the Deal with E-Cigarettes? The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released new rules pertaining to what they have labeled “all tobacco products.” These products include cigarettes, cigars, hookah tobacco, pipe tobacco and others, but perhaps the most controversial of all products now governed is the e-cigarette.While there has been a decline in cigarette use among youth over the past decade, e-cigarette use has increased by nearly 900 percent from 2011 to 2016 in high school students, according to a recent survey supported by the FDA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The new rules, which begin in August with retailers being barred from selling tobacco products to anyone under 18, placing them in vending machines or distributing them as free samples, will require that e-cigarettes and their ingredients be reviewed by regulators to remain on the market. A Q&A with Andrew Strasser, PhD, director of Penn’s Biobehavioral Smoking Lab, discusses these new regulations, the e-cigarette craze, and what has the vaping industry fuming (pun intended). Read about it at bit.ly/298iBIP.
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at WHAT’S
UP HUP?
Allen Green
Victoria Dixon
Michelle Baylock
Joseph Robinson
QUESTION: What do you do to de-stress? I never stress. I take each day at a time. If it’s something you can’t change, why stress about it? — Allen Green, Pathology Administration
Drink wine. Moscato is my wine of choice!
I go home. I de-stress as soon as I get on the train! — Michelle Baylock, Medical Pathology
I laugh — find the humor in things. It’s very important. — Joseph Robinson, Ambassador
— Victoria Dixon, Nursing
HUP Wins Top Marks in Stroke Status… Again!
When it comes to treating strokes, timing is everything. The patient must receive treatment within hours of the onset of symptoms. As a result, even before an ambulance arrives with a potential stroke patient to HUP’s emergency room, the multidisciplinary stroke team is waiting and ready. It’s all part of the process that has earned HUP the Get With The Guidelines®- Stroke Gold Plus and Target: Stroke Honor Roll Elite Plus status for three consecutive years from the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association. HUP is one of only 100 Joint Commission certified comprehensive stroke centers in the country. “The Target Stroke program is an AHA initiative to decrease the time from the patient’s arrival until treatment with tPA [tissue plasminogen activator], with a goal of less than one hour,” said Jean Luciano, RN, MSN, CRNP, CNRN, SCRN, of HUP’s Comprehensive Stroke Center. “We’re trying to lower the goal to 45 minutes.” And they’re doing by streamlining the process. While en route to HUP, the EMS makes a “haste call” to the ER and the ER notifies the stroke team. When the ambulance arrives, the patient is taken immediately to the CT scanner to determine the type of stroke. If it’s ischemic and the patient meets treatment criteria, the clot-buster drug tPA is given to break up the clot and open blood flow to the brain. In addition to using tPA or when tPA can’t be used as treatment — for example, if the person is on a blood thinner — HUP offers endovascular therapy in which the patient is taken to interventional radiology to remove the clot. Here again, the process is streamlined, thanks to a multidisciplinary process that expedites both the diagnostic testing and the endovascular therapy. “HUP’s Comprehensive Stroke Center is a top referral center for this treatment,” Luciano said, receiving stroke patients from a large network of hospitals in the tri-state area. It’s this precision that not only may save the lives of stroke patients but also optimizes their potential for a meaningful recovery after their stroke. “Patients who presented with devastating deficits have been able to go home and resume their normal life,” she said. “That is the impetus for continuing to improve the care that we provide for our patients.” All five of Penn Medicine’s hospitals received Get With The Guidelines Stroke Quality Achievement Awards. To read more, go to www.uphs.upenn. edu/news/News_Releases/2016/06/guidelines/.
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JOIN TEAM PENN FOR
The MS Bike Tour Our 2016 MS City to Shore Bike Tour Registration Drive is kicking off and 261 of your peers have already registered! We need you to help our team reach our goal of 400. The ride will take place on Saturday and Sunday, September 24 and 25. Since the team was created in 2006, it has raised $2 million! The UPHS/PENN team is the first in City-to-Shore history to reach that mark. This year, we want to raise more than $275,000. Each person who raises the minimum $300 receives a free customized team jersey. To learn more or register for the ride, visit http://bit.ly/295VsFo.
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SeniorE.Vice President, Public Affairs Susan Phillips Senior Vice President, Public Affairs Holly Auer Director of Communications
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