With a collaborative poster presentation that recently took second place among 90 entries at the 2017 Quality and Safety Education for Nurses (QSEN) National Forum, UAB Hospital Chief Nursing Officer (CNO) Terri Poe, DNP, RN, NE-BC, and UAB School of Nursing Assistant Dean for Clinical Innovation and Assistant Professor Shea Polancich, PhD, RN, continued to highlight the work of the UAB Nursing Partnership.
The theme of this year’s annual conference of the QSEN Institute, a collaborative of health care professionals focused on education, practice, and scholarship to improve the quality and safety of health care systems, was “Going the Magnificent Mile with the QSEN Competencies.”
The Partnership is an interprofessional collaboration between the School and UAB Medicine designed to significantly reshape the scope and impact of nursing at one of the nation’s premier academic medical centers and third largest public hospital. One of the aims of the partnership is to harness expertise from the academic and clinical areas to improve quality and safety in patient care.Poe and Polancich’s presentation was entitled, “Advancing Quality Improvement Competence: The Development of a CNO Accountability Scorecard.”
“This collaborative poster presentation is one of the many examples of the groundbreaking work being done through the UAB Nursing Partnership,” Poe said. “It showcased an innovative way to recognize opportunities to improve quality patient care that drew the attention of many people from multiple health care organizations attending the QSEN National Forum.
“There was great interest in how we maximize expertise from the academic and clinical areas of the partnership, creatively present quality data in an efficient, succinct way, and have found an approach that that allows organizational best practices and opportunities related to nursing-sensitive issues to be noted with one view. We clearly demonstrated the use of a nursing leadership CNO accountability tool across our system, and that collaborative development is at the heart of the UAB Nursing Partnership.”
Working from data compiled and insights gained from the Partnership’s continuing effort to align critical resources to provide outstanding patient care, invest in teaching and training for further interprofessional collaboration, and partner in research and scholarship, Poe and Polancich developed the CNO accountability scorecard to drive improvement outcomes at the front line of care. Specifically, their presentation stressed the importance of developing numeracy – the capacity for quantitative thought and expression -- and evaluating QSEN’s quality improvement competency for describing the benefits and limitations of nursing quality improvement data sources, measurement and data analysis strategies.
“Recognition of this poster at the QSEN National Forum is a testament to the translation of the Partnership work from theory to practice,” Polancich said. “This project shows the value of quality improvement as the framework for the underlying nursing education system and the results of that foundation in the clinical delivery of nursing care.
“This is just one shining example of how the UAB Nursing Partnership continues to evolve and grow with excellent outcomes and results.”
Poe is a two-time graduate of the School with a Bachelor of Science in Nursing degree (1986) and a Doctor of Nursing Practice degree (2013). Polancich received her Master of Science in Nursing degree from the School (1996) and serves as the Partnership’s liaison between the School and health system.
