Ann has a wide range of critical care skills in her toolkit. As a CNS she uses her clinical skill set to occasionally care for patients when the need arises and does so with a smile on her face. Her skill set led her down the CNS path and in that role she helps to mentor and develop the clinical skills of others. A main avenue she uses for doing this is side by side critical thinking development, whether it is asking a probing question to the staff RN to get them to think more deeply about a clinical issue, or looking at the evidence with that RN to guide them down the correct clinical path for their patient.
Ann always has the patient and their family at the forefront of any care she is helping to provide or in guiding staff in their provision of that care. A great example of this is the multi-disciplinary rounds she helps lead daily on CVCU for our CV surgery patients. Ann will go into each room and ask the patient and family if they would like to participate and ensures that their voice is always heard in these rounds. She has led the team down the path of family conferences and palliative care consults when that is shown to be the more compassionate route for the patient than continuing on our current course. She compassionately cares for our staff as well, which I will cover in the Service section. Ann has provided similar care in the other units she serves for many years.
It is hard for me to think of Ann without thinking of all the services she provides to our patients and staff. First as noted above she leads our multidisciplinary rounds on CVCU. She has mediated crucial conversations with Physicians and staff that have resulted in strong collaboration and working relationships. When I floated down to ICU several months ago on a weekend, Ann was there on her day off making sure their skin protocol research study was running smoothly. Most recently for me, she has been integral in our research study on CV Surgery patients by arriving between 0630 and 0700 to consent the patients while in pre-op, and rounding on the unit to consent inpatients. She has called in on weekends to ensure we have data collection occurring and stays late often during the week to get data collection done. This study will potentially last 6-9 months and this level of service is unmatched by the rest of our research team. Ann recently helped our team apply for the Beacon Award. At first, she just guided us, and then helped write the Patient Outcomes section. In the month before we submitted the award, Ann and I exchanged information almost daily to get the final draft to the place where we felt we had a document ready for submission. I could not have completed that project without her assistance.
By assisting various units, including CVCU, with their research projects and other evidence-based practice question, Ann is continuously working to improve the practice of our staff and the outcomes for our patients. She gently supports staff on this journey, however, does not do all the work for them. In our CV surgery rounds she brings up questions about the care, like suggesting bowel protocol when there has been no BM in 3 days, that help support a positive outcome for the patient and these suggestions or questions always lead to the implementation of current evidence, or a quest for evaluation of the current evidence. As noted above she is currently supporting several research studies and is helping IMCU with their Beacon award submission.
What I really think makes Ann a DAISY Nurse though, is that sparkle I see in her eye when she engages others in the pursuit of excellence through improving practice and implementing evidence-based practice. She mediates, moderates and always has a positive spin on any situation. I love working with Ann!