Innovation Awards recognize nursing initiatives.
The 2022 American Nurses Association (ANA) Innovation Awards, sponsored by Stryker, recognized an individual nurse’s efforts to make healthcare in eastern North Carolina more accessible and approachable, and a team of nurses in Houston whose initiative improved training for nurses learning skills in vascular catheter care. The honorees reflect exemplary innovations that enhance patient safety and health outcomes, according to Oriana Beaudet, DNP, RN, PHN, vice president of nursing innovation at ANA. “These winners have proven that nurses are able to make incredible strides and improve health while navigating turbulent times,” she said. “They created solutions that scaled beyond their organizations, into their communities, and globally.”
The Individual Nurse Award ($25,000) and Nurse-led Team Award ($50,000) support developing, prototyping, producing, testing, and implementing innovations over 12 months.
Individual Nurse Award
clinics bring healthcare
services to rural
communities.
Kasheta Jackson, DNP, RN, vice president of health equity and social impact at Vidant Health in Greenville, North Carolina, developed Community Pop-Ups: A Rural Approach to address social and economic healthcare barriers. This delivery model, which involves community-based pop-up clinics across eastern North Carolina, makes healthcare more accessible and approachable by providing preventive services, improving care equity, and offering resources in communities with the greatest need. Community Pop-Ups accomplishes this by combining system-level collaboration at Vidant Health with community-focused interventions. Through partnerships with community leaders and other Vidant Health team members, the pop-up clinics have evolved from solely offering healthcare screenings to providing COVID-19 testing, vaccinations, mental health resources, access to fresh produce, and employment opportunities.
Community Pop-Ups follows the tenets of a holistic nursing care plan—addressing the community’s physical, mental, and environmental needs—and builds trust to improve community engagement. In 2021, Community Pop-Ups offered care to more than 400 participants, identified acute diseases, provided numerous jobs, gave away 500 produce boxes, and delivered 500 health passports. In 2022, Jackson and her colleagues plan to make a more substantial impact by using qualitative data to establish a model for addressing social determinants of health.
Nurse-led Team Award
has boosted nurses’
confidence starting
PIV lines.
A five-member team of frontline nurses at Texas Children’s Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) created RediStik® Wearable Simulation Task Trainers to fill the gaps they saw in training tools for nurses to learn skills in peripheral intravenous (PIV), port-a-cath, and central venous catheter care and maintenance. The team (Michael Pickett, MSN, APRN, CPNP, pediatric nurse practitioner at Texas Children’s Hospital; Marilyn Hockenberry, PhD, RN, FAAN, professor of pediatrics and director of Global HOPE nursing at BCM; Jaime Choate, MSN, RN, NPD-BC, nursing professional development specialist at Texas Children’s Hospital; Tadala Mulemba, BScNM, RN, Global HOPE nursing assistant director at BCM; and Jeannie Eggers, MSN, RN, CPN, CCRN, simulation education specialist at Texas Children’s Hospital) noted that existing training tools for using these catheters weren’t realistic. Working together, they designed RediStik, which gives nurses hands-on practice and real-time feedback from instructors via Zoom. Users also have access to simulation trainers and can watch skills videos filmed from a nurse’s point of view. Before training with RediStik, 15% of nurses surveyed said they were “confident” about starting PIV lines; after training, 96% were “confident.”
RediStik has made its mark not only in Houston, but also internationally through a Texas Children’s Hospital partnership with the Global HOPE initiative, which seeks to build long-term capacity for treating and significantly improving the prognosis for children with cancer and blood disorders in sub-Saharan Africa. The honorees will use the award funds to distribute more RediStik trainers.
Apply for the 2023 Innovation Awards through November 4, 2022.
