MCN. The American journal of maternal child nursing
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As any perinatal nurse knows, retained vaginal sponges are an obstetrical and postpartum patient safety problem. As surgical sponge counts are not routine in some obstetrical units for vaginal births, our healthcare system chose to institute a rigorous process to eliminate retained sponges in all vaginal births. This article describes this process, along with the lessons learned, when Catholic Healthcare West implemented the Sponge ACCOUNTing System in its 32 hospitals in California, Arizona, and Nevada. Implementation of this process involved the standardization of practice for obstetricians, certified nurse midwives, nurses, obstetric technicians, radiologists, and radiology technicians in the management and accounting of surgical sponges.
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MCN Am J Matern Child Nurs · Sep 2011
Case ReportsA state-wide obstetric hemorrhage quality improvement initiative.
The mission of the California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative is to eliminate preventable maternal death and injury and to promote equitable maternity care in California. This article describes California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative's (CMQCC's) statewide multistakeholder quality improvement initiative to improve readiness, recognition, response, and reporting of maternal hemorrhage at birth and details the essential role of nurses in its success. ⋯ In participating hospitals, nurses have been the primary drivers in developing both general and massive hemorrhage policies and procedures, ensuring the availability of critical supplies, organizing team debriefing after a stage 2 (or greater) hemorrhage, hosting skills stations for measuring blood loss, and running obstetric (OB) hemorrhage drills. Each of these activities requires effort and leadership skill, even in hospitals where clinicians are convinced that these changes are needed. In some hospitals, the burden to convince physicians of the value of these new practices has rested primarily upon nurses. Thus, the statewide initiative in which nurse and physician leaders work together models the value of teamwork and provides a real-time demonstration of the potential for effective interdisciplinary collaboration to make a difference in the quality of care that can be achieved. Nurses provide significant leadership in multidisciplinary, multistakeholder quality projects in California. Ensuring that nurses have the opportunity to participate in formal leadership of these teams and are represented at all workgroup levels is critical to the overall initiative. Nurses brought key understanding of operational issues within and across departments, mobilized engagement across the state through the regional perinatal programs, and developed innovative approaches to solving clinical problems during implementation. Nursing leadership and integrated participation was especially critical in considering the needs of lower-resource settings, and was essential to the toolkit's enthusiastic adoption at the unit/service level in facilities across the state.
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The purpose of this article is to describe the journey a multicampus hospital system took to improve the obstetric triage process. A review of literature revealed no current comprehensive obstetric acuity tool, and thus our team developed a tool with a patient flow process, revised and updated triage nurse competencies, and then educated the nurses about the new tool and process. ⋯ This improved all data points. The result of this QI project is that our patients are now seen based on their acuity within designated time frames.
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This article describes a quality improvement project in which early skin-to-skin (STS) contact, in the operating room (OR) and during recovery, was used as an intervention to increase the success of breastfeeding initiation among healthy infants after cesarean, at a large, urban, acute care teaching hospital. The nursing role is key for the intervention, but the program involves the entire perinatal team, including the obstetricians, pediatricians, and anesthesiologists. During the first 3 months of our intervention, the rate of early STS among healthy babies born by cesarean increased from 20% to 68%. ⋯ Healthy infants born by cesarean who experienced STS in the OR had lower rates of formula supplementation in the hospital (33%), compared to infants who experienced STS within 90 minutes but not in the OR (42%), and those who did not experience STS in the first 90 minutes of life (74%). We concluded that STS contact was feasible after cesarean and could be provided for healthy mothers and infants immediately after cesarean birth. Perinatal and neonatal nurses should be leaders in changing practice to incorporate early STS contact into routine care after cesarean birth.