Journal of Community & Public Health Nursing
Open Access

Abstract

Providing high quality and meaningful education was a challenge prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, and has become even more challenging as team members are stretched thin between staffing crises and looming financial pressure. As many other healthcare organizations saw, Corewell began to see an increase in their patient safety events, and a decrease in their patient safety and reliability culture. Knowing the financial and time pressure, the Patient Safety and Reliabilty team moved training away from having all team members attend High Reliability training in person, where they watched a three hour, PowerPoint presentation, to an innovative microsystem, microtraining platform. Literatrure shows that leaders need to lead a reliability culture, so we begin with a six hour, in person leadership training session. In this session we teach leaders not only high reliability principles, but how to lead using them, and how to solve problems in a reliable manner. Following the leadership training teams receive an asynchronous learning modulde, which is designed to take 6 months to complete. The learning module consists of 6 individual lessons, which are broken down into microlearning videos. All team members take the same microlearning videos within the same timeframe, which then allows us to us the rounding to influence methodology to reinforce the learning from the videos. This also gives team members an opporotunity to ask any questions they may have regarding the universal skill for error prevention that they learned about. This training has gone live in two service lines, and three entity hospitals. Corewell just completed their safety culture survey, and in the three entity hospitals that have completed training, they have seen gains in their safety culture results, as opposed to all other spaces which have either been flat or decreased.

Biography

Heather Githu, BSN, RN is the manager to the Patient Safety and Reliability team at Corewell Health West in Grand Rapids, Mi. Heather began her nursing career in a pediatric critical care unit, in a level one trauma center. She developed a passion for patient safety following a significant safety event that occurred early in her nursing carrer. This passion intensified when her father had a serious safety event in the hospital system where she worked. After 17 years in the PCCU, Heather moved over to working in the patient safety and reliability field full time. Her goal is to work with teams to help designs systems that will prevent harm from reaching patients. Her professional passions include- teaching safety and reliability classes, leading teams, and designing systems. Heather is currently pursuing her Master of Applied Science in Patient Safety and Healthcare Quality from Johns Hopkins University (Graduation Date, May 2023). Heather enjoys spending time with her husband, Sammy, two daughters, Makena and Naomi, and her dog, Finn.