We have just wrapped up Nurses Week 2022, which felt so different than past years’ celebrations! Certainly, it was different primarily because we are emerging from under the oppression of COVID. But this year, the NursesRock Committee brought a whole new feel to Nurses Week with the theme, “UAMS Nurses AR Rooted in Strength”, inspired by the American Association of Critical-care Nurses (AACN). We heard the wonderful announcement about the Nurses Garden unveiled at the CNO Kick-off last Thursday. We celebrated all Arkansas nurses with the blue and white lighting of the bridges in downtown Little Rock, in addition to the Union Plaza building, Simmons building, and the Statehouse fountain. We celebrated some amazing accomplishments of units in quality metrics and patient satisfaction. We thanked our team members for being part of our strength needed to care for patients. And we recognized over 60 remarkable nurses in the Annual Professional Nursing Awards and the Awards of Excellence ceremonies. Thank you to our UAMS NursesRock Committee for bringing us such a wonderful week!
Another amazing accomplishment of a team of UAMS nurses that is not well-known is the completion of the first 6 Magnet stories required by the 2023 Magnet Application Manual. Ten UAMS nurses from across the organization make up the UAMS Magnet Writing Team, and they are dedicated to writing about the achievements of UAMS nurses. When I sent an email recently, thanking them for their work, one remarked, “My coworkers deserve all the benefits that working at a Magnet status hospital will grant them. I’m happy to be part of that process in any way.” Several writers have remarked how they are inspired to learn about the work of UAMS nurses implementing new practices, advancing patient care, supporting community hospitals through outreach, and improving the quality outcomes our of patients. One of the first stories completed answered the 14th Magnet Outcome in the Exemplary Professional Practice section of the manual. This outcome requires an example of how clinical nurses have the autonomy to make nursing care decisions within the full scope of their nursing practice. The story with the best supporting evidence for this outcome is the PIV infiltration and extravasation care and treatment provided by nurses in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). The NICU nurses received special training in the assessment and management of neonatal peripheral infiltration and extravasation. This training is supported by their policy on central and PIV maintenance and skin antisepsis in infants, which provides information on infiltration and extravasation of PIV sites, criteria for staging infiltrations, and an algorithm to guide clinical nurses’ autonomous patient care decisions including selection and administration of an appropriate antidote if necessary.
This is just one example of Nursing Excellence at UAMS. The Magnet Writing Team will spend the next 20 months writing up stories of Nursing Excellence – your stories – of how you exemplify professional practice, use shared governance to engage in decision making, innovate and improve patient care with new knowledge and how you transform the profession of nursing through leadership. Share the stories of your colleagues and the incredible work you are doing in your areas on the Center for Nursing Excellence website.