Highlighting the 2020 ANA Innovation Award winners

Earlier this year, the American Nurses Association (ANA) and the American Nurses Foundation announced the winners of the 2020 ANA Innovation Awards, powered by BD (Becton, Dickinson and Company), a leading global medical technology company. ANA Enterprise Chief Executive Officer Loressa Cole, DNP, MBA, RN, NEA-BC, FACHE; ANA Vice President of Nursing Innovation Oriana Beaudet, DNP, RN, PHN; and BD’s Vice President of Thought Leadership Kelly Robke, MBA, MS, RN, presented the awards.

The ANA Innovation Awards highlight, recognize, and celebrate exemplary nurse-led innovation that improves patient safety and outcomes. The individual nurse and nurse-led team award recipients receive monetary prizes of $25,000 and $50,000, respectively. These funds provide support for translational research, development, prototyping, production, testing, and implementation of winners’ products over the next year.

Individual Nurse Award winner

 Jan Tedder, BSN, FNP, IBCLC

Tedder, a nurse for over 30 years, developed HUG Your Baby, an evidence-based program that helps new mothers and families better understand their baby’s excessive crying, frequent awakenings, increased stranger anxiety, and perceived inability to latch for breastfeeding. HUG Your Baby uses family-friendly and multicultural language, inspiring videos, and engaging content to help parents, and the nurses who serve them, better understand commonly misinterpreted behaviors (which can reduce poor parent-child attachment) and empower new moms to continue breastfeeding if they chose to. In 2019, HUG Your Baby online courses were completed by 800 birth, lactation, and parenting professionals. A number of peer-reviewed articles have credited HUG Your Baby with decreasing maternal stress and increasing nurses’ and parents’ confidence.

Nurse-led Team Award winner

Joey Ferry, RN, and Taofiki Gafar-Schaner, BSN, RN

Ferry and Gafar-Schaner developed SafeSeizure™ to standardize bed rail pads and help nurses implement better seizure-precaution protocols. SafeSeizure pads are convenient, inflatable, water resistant, and universal. They help improve patient safety and compliance standards, decrease hospital-acquired infections and work-related injuries, and reduce unnecessary linen costs and use. Many existing bed rail pads are too large, difficult to store, and expensive. This leads to variations in practice from hospital to hospital and using poor practices such as padding bed rails with linen. In a survey of two hospital nursing units, 94% of nurses said SafeSeizure pads worked as expected and felt that they’re safer than the pads they currently use. In the same survey, these facilities reported a 31% decrease in linen costs per patient.

“Congratulations to this year’s winners. Jan, Joey, and Taofiki are shining examples of nurses who are breaking barriers across the healthcare continuum and defying stereotypes about the nursing profession,” Beaudet said.

The winners will have 1 year to further develop their innovations and will share outcomes and findings in 2021.