Since Claudia started working in the CCU, she has always been eager to learn. As she has gained experience as a bedside nurse, that eagerness to learn has now turned into an eagerness and willingness to educate patients, families, and staff members. With such a large volume of new nurses being oriented in the CCU, Claudia enthusiastically took on the role of preceptor. As a preceptor, she has been able to create an environment that encourages and inspires teaching, that promotes family-centered care, and focuses on patient outcomes. Becoming a preceptor has taught her how to adapt her teaching methods depending on the learner and has strengthened her ability to give in-the-moment feedback to keep our patients safe.

She continues to be a part of a core group of nurses that have been working to strengthen our newer CCU nurses so that they can be excellent advocates for their patients and families. Along with taking on the role of preceptor, Claudia also became the CCU's QPPS chair. In this role, she took on two major projects this year that are both focused on enhancing the care of our patients and families. As the QPPS chair, Claudia has become very familiar with nursing policies and procedures and the difficulties that nurses have had when trying to find policies and procedures through the Policy Manager on the @CHOP site. As a bedside nurse, Claudia understood this struggle and decided to do some digging. She was able to work with unit-based and hospital-wide leadership to determine how to fix this problem. In the end, she created a tip sheet that she shared with nursing staff in the CCU, that breaks down how to use the Policy Manager.

Since then, nurses on the unit have increased their use of the Policy Manager, in turn creating a safer environment of care for our patients and families. Although she is not a nurse that works in the CCU's education room yet, Claudia took it upon herself to partner with the education room to figure out the best approach for teaching all nurses on our unit how to teach CPR class, medications class, and heart rate auscultation class to our families. This project was initiated in the wake of us being short-staffed in the education room and needing support to ensure that all families were taught these vital classes before going home.

Claudia aided in creating the guidelines that each nurse must meet to be deemed competent to teach our families and created a spreadsheet to track the progress of teaching across the CCU. This has helped to increase our ability to properly educate our patients' families. Claudia is always looking for ways to become involved and her eagerness to learn has made her an amazing teacher and patient advocate in the CCU.