New GW Lab Named After Former INQRI Grantee

George Washington University’s School of Nursing recently opened a new skills and simulation laboratory at the school’s Virginia Science and Technology Campus. The “Johnson Lab” is named after the School of Nursing founder, and former INQRI Grantee, Jean Johnson.

The new facility will serve as a virtual hospital and includes beds for 10 mannequins that simulate patients from infants to the elderly.

RWJF Executive Nurse Fellows program alumna Pamela Jeffries serves as the current dean of the School of Nursing and was instrumental in the launch of the lab.

“When you look at traditional clinical training, if you don’t have sims, you are always a student nurse and always following your instructor,” Jeffries told GW Today. “And then you graduate, and you are an RN, and if you’ve never functioned as an RN before, that’s a problem. What we’re doing here is we are having you rehearse your roll.”

Johnson’s INQRI-supported work, in collaboration with Shoshanna Sofaer, helped to shed light on whether some of the National Quality Forum's nursing sensitive measures are perceived as meaningful by consumers. The team conducted focus groups with recently hospitalized patients to understand their perception of the measures. Consumers found several patient safety measures to be very compelling, and clearly believed that nurses had a significant role in hospital quality. However, consumers did not think nurses should be advising patients to quit smoking, stating that nurses have better things to do with their time. The team learned that overall the public, while valuing nurses highly, has an incomplete understanding of their job duties and to whom they are accountable.

The Value-Added of Electronic Medical Records

An article in ADVANCE for Nurses looks at the ways in which health information technology is improving care, outcomes and nurses' work environments in health care settings around the country, particularly when that IT is built with nursing in mind.

At Baptist Health South Florida, patient barcodes allow nurses quick and easy access to their patients' full profiles. The barcodes have dramatically reduced wait time for pain medication and also helped to ensure that nurses know the exact doses and frequency of dosage for each of their patients' medications. Several INQRI studies have addresses nurses' role in medication management, including reducing medication errors and improving regimen adherence post hospital discharge.

Other uses of health IT, include automating the admissions process, so that when information on a patient is recorded during intake, that information is shared with other health care providers and hospital staff who may help provide care.

The article also discusses younger nurses' higher comfort level with information technology and ways that hospitals are successfully orienting new hires to their electronic medical records (EMR) systems and how schools of nursing are preparing students to use those records. A recent post on the RWJF Human Capital Blog by Ann Marie Mauro, an associate professor at NYU College of Nursing discusses how the college's simulation program also helps nursing students learn how to use EMR.