Nursing Excellence at CTCA at Midwestern

Kim Bertini: My name is Kim Bertini and I’m the magnet coordinator at the Cancer Treatment Centers of America at Midwestern Regional Medical Center. There are lots of programs that set our nursing department apart here at CTCA Midwestern Regional Medical Center from other hospitals. One of them being that we’re ranked in the top five percent for nationally benchmarked hospitals that have master prepared nurses at the bedside and that has national certified nurses delivering care at the bedside. One of the ways we ensure this is that we have a clinical ladder program; our ACE ladder. Since the institution of the ACE ladder we have tripled the amount of nurses that are currently enrolled. Last year we had a little over thirty nurses and this past year we had over seventy graduates from the ACE clinical ladder. The nursing staff at CTCA daily feels empowered and feels that they have the autonomy to deliver evidence based practice to their patients every single day, whether it’s in the outpatient setting or in the inpatient setting their constantly taking charge in leading in the care planning of their patients and in the patient’s family. We’re very fortunate here not only to have great nursing leadership but we have a CEO who was a nurse at one point and actually was our CNO in lead our nursing staff. This has lead to a very collaborative and cohesive relationship between the nursing staff and the rest of the hospital. We’re patient focused and centered, delivering care directly to them and their family’s. Here at CTCA at Midwestern Regional Medical Center we like to encourage our nurses to go back to school. We encourage our ADN, our diploma nurses to go back and get their bachelors and our bachelor’s nurses to go back and get their masters. This is why we rank so high on the ND and QI surveys for hospitals who have master prepared nurses delivering bedside care. We have a scholarship called the Mary Brown Steven Scholarship that we offer internally to both our PCT’s and our nurses or anyone who wants to go back to school. Our professional practice model is relationship based care, and one of the seven dynamics that goes into relationship based care is care of the caregiver and we try to encourage care of the caregiver several different ways. We have a cafeteria for our employees only where we deliver wholesome foods; we deliver low fat healthy meals in providing all of the nutritional benefits for our CTCA employees and our nurses so they can stay on top of their health. We also have a wellness committee where we try to encourage and put up a board for people who like to do 5-K runs or exercise, it’s sort of a blog where you can go on and you can see all of the good things out and about in the communities to stay active and healthy. We also offer our staff and our nurses all of the same naturopathic and nutritional benefits that our patients and caregivers receive. We truly believe in taking care of our caregivers because if we’re not at our best how can we deliver our best to our patients and our nurses?