Running head: PROFESSIONAL MEETING PAPER 1

A Professional Nursing Meeting

Autumn Bryan

BSMCON Professional Role Development

On my honor, I have neither given nor received aid on this assignment or

test, and I pledge that I am in compliance with the BSMCON Honor System
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A Professional Nursing Meeting

I attended the Nursing Council meeting at Memorial Regional Medical Center on

Tuesday October 18, 2016. The overall purpose of the professional committee meeting was to

discuss new and recurrent problems or topics that need to be discussed. The nursing council at

Memorial Regional meets every third Tuesday of the month to discuss these issues. The first

topic that was discussed was the hospitals main issues from last month. The two they focused on

were falls and linen issues. After that, majority of the meeting consisted of a leader from each of

their 4 smaller councils discussing their specific current issues related to their council. The 4

councils were Practice Quality, Education and Research, Night Shift Council, and Recruitment

and Retention. The topics that were covered after the council leaders spoke were nurse week

gifts, a change in the councils leaders, post mortem care, dressing changes in the urology, and

the Clinical Scholars Hybrid Program.

Application of Course Material

Three ways the nursing council aligns with the course content are: Business of

Healthcare, Advocacy, and Quality and Safety. An example of the Business in Healthcare that

was discussed during the meeting was about linen utilization. The clinical liaison manager from

the linen company that supplies all of Bon Secours hospitals came to discuss how the linen

system works and how to decrease the amount of money spent on wasted linen. She requested

that the council make linen stewardship an agenda item at clinical meetings, including nursing

councils. The manager discussed how to use linen appropriately, to ensure all linen is always

returned, to always follow the hospital bed changing policy, to never give it away, and to only

provide the patient what they will need for the day. As explained in the Clean India Journal,
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Relationships between the launderettes and hospitals get strained as hospitals face shortage of

linen during crisis. Many a time, it is difficult to count soiled linen. This creates a rift between

the hospital and the linen contractor. Consequently, hospitals lose on stock of linen, as new linen

needs to be constantly bought to replace torn and soiled ones (Ganesh, G., 2012). She stated

that Memorial Regional Medical Center lost 75,000 pounds of linen in the last 12 months which

equaled a total of $43,000. It was also discussed that MRMC had a consistent loss each month

due to losing linen in the trash and losing linen during transport of patients.

An example of advocacy in the professional meeting was when the leader talked about

wrongly identifying patients during post mortem care. There was a patient identification issue

where a patient went down to the morgue with two different patient labels and therefore the body

could not be properly identified. The nurse manager that was telling this story and advocating

for future patients stated that there should be a two-person checkoff before sending a patient to

the morgue to prevent this from happening again. There is a two person check off when a baby

is born, so it was stated it would be a good idea to implement this for when a person passes. If

this was agreed upon, there would need to be a certain way to document the two signatures in

Connect Care. Both people, either two nurses or a tech and a nurse, would check the patient arm

band, the labels that come in the post mortem kit, and the record of death. Whether this is

implemented at the hospital, more training is needed to prevent this from occurring again. As

stated in the article, Registered nurses regard patient misidentification as a very rare and

unlikely event. Nonetheless, statistics suggest otherwise and education, changes in protocols, and

new technologies are needed to improve the precision of patient identification (Bartlova et al.,

2015).

An example of quality and safety was explained by another nurse manager who works in
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urology. She told the council the story of a recent patient whose life was in jeopardy because

their nephrostomy tube had not been cared for properly. She stated that there needs to be more

consistency with dressing changes and that the doctors need to outline what to use every time so

that there isnt any confusion. Due to this incident there needs to be more training on dressing

changes to improve the quality of the nurses skills and also promote the patients safety and

overall health. There was also discussion about the quality of care when obtaining urine

samples from patients. Improper collection methods could jeopardize the patients labs which

would therefore impact the quality of their care.

Application to Profession of Nursing

The idea of bringing nurses from every unit together to discuss matters that affect the

entire hospital is a great idea and important to continue. The only way for new and improved

ideas to be safely implemented is after they are discussed in depth and agreed upon by all units.

The professional nurse meetings are a way for nurses to come together for the better and allows

them to have more of a voice. These meetings are also a way or nurses to collaborate, empower,

and praise each other. During the meeting it was obvious how much each of the nurses really

care about the wellbeing and safety of their patients and each other.

Reflection

Nurses involvement in their workplace is essential to quality patient centered care.

Nurses are the only health professionals that are consistently by the patients bedside, and

therefore must be willing to speak up and advocate for patients when they see something wrong

or something that needs to be brought to the doctors attention. Nurses assume that they have an

ethical obligation to advocate for their patients. They also frequently describe their judgments

and actions on behalf of a patient as being a patient advocate (Negarandeh, R., 2016). Nurses
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involvement in their workplace makes for better patient care and better morale among other

nurses and staff. It shows that that nurses care about their job, the patients, and all hospital staff.

By attending this meeting, it has peaked my interest in becoming a nurse manager later in

my nursing career. I like the fact that the nurse manager is the main voice for the unit they work

on and is responsible for relaying the feelings and ideas from that unit. I now realize the

responsibility they hold when being a superior to so many nurses and supervising the care of so

many patients. I applaud anyone works in that role because I can now imagine the time and

passion that goes into it.

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References

Bartlova, S., Hajduchova, H., Brabcova, I., Tothova, V. (2015). Patient Misidentification in

Nursing Care. Neuroendocrinology Letters. 36(2): 17-22.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/289970673_Patient_misidentification_

in_nursing_care

Ganesh, G. (2012). Linen Management in Hospitals. Clean India Journal, Retrieved from

http://www.cleanindiajournal.com/linen_management_in_hospitals/.

Negarandeh, R. (2016). Patient Advocacy: Barriers and Facilitators. BMC Nursing.

http://nursinglink.monster.com/training/articles/929-patient-advocacy-barriers-

and-facilitators