Jazz is an exemplary staff nurse on 8B. Her caring and compassion for her patients and families as well as her positive attitude and sunny disposition make her a valuable asset to our unit.
Her commitment to service excellence is very evident in her work with a family currently on our unit. The patient has been in Children's Hospital for over a month and has spent much of that time on 8B following a PICU stay. She and her family relocated to the United States from Nepal just two days prior to her arrival at CHP after a brief stay at an outlying hospital. The child has very complex medical issues including hydrocephalus, seizures and a severe developmental delay. Her admission here has resulted in extensive dental surgery and placement of a gastrostomy tube for enteral feeds. Her father has been the family member present with her throughout her stay. He does not speak English, does not read or write in his native language and has health problems that required a hospital admission of his own during the last month. Communication with him has been difficult at best requiring the frequent use of the translator phone.
There have been many services involved in the care of this child and certainly care co-ordination and social work have played an integral part. As she is nearing the end of her stay, preparing this child and her family for discharge has been quite a challenge. Questions were raised about how best to teach this patient's father complex instructions regarding medications, feedings and GT care. Jazz, demonstrating creativity and innovative thinking, developed a wonderful teaching plan utilizing color coding of medication syringes along with laminated cards showing pictures of color coded clocks. She also used stickers, and tape marks on syringes as teaching tools. All of this served as very visual and easily understood instructions for the patients' father. We can see that he is understanding them. He is now pointing to the clock for medication administration, letting the nurses know that it is time for a med.
Thanks to the somewhat unorthodox but very effective teaching methods developed by Jazz, we are all feeling much more confident in this fathers ability to care for his child upon discharge. She truly puts the families and "KIDS FIRST".