During the rise of the COVID surge, we began to see that our ICU/IMCU population was increasing. We have a ten-bed Intensive Care Unit that houses ICU and IMCU patients. The unit usually remains full and occasionally we have one or two ICU and/or IMCU patients holding in the Emergency Department. We frequently manage this by downgrading patients from the ICU to the floor so that we can get the patients up from the ED. When the surge progressed, we hit a peak and had ten ICU patients in the ICU that were not going to be downgraded for a very long time, and nine floor patients that were upgraded to IMCU status and needed to go to the ICU unit. We also had 12 ICU patients in the ED that needed to go to the ICU unit. The number of patients does not sound high but when you convert this into a percentage it is extremely high and equates to over a 300% capacity of our ICU/IMCU population. We only had enough staff to take care of ten ICU/IMCU patients, not 31. We were in a staffing crisis!
As an organization that stands for high reliability and always puts safety first, this became our number one priority! We gathered a group of our most experienced Medical-Surgical Nurses and talked with them about IMCU COVID training to help care for these patients and the response was heartfelt! We were able to team up with our amazing education on rapidly creating an IMCU COVID training to meet the demand of caring for these patients who will be housed on the floor. We had 26 Medical-Surgical Nurses who stepped up and attended the training and with the collaboration and partnership of the education department, training was completed in two weeks. Every Nurse that was asked to participate did so willingly.
When a new change is implemented, sometimes there can be fear and frustration. With these Medical-Surgical Nurses, this did not occur. They were excited to be part of a solution to a great challenge. This solution helped offload our Intensive Care Unit and Emergency Department so that we could all take care of our patients safely. The Medical-Surgical floor had IMCU patients from June until the end of August and during this time there were zero poor outcomes because of the great care of the Nurses! I am extremely proud of our Medical-Surgical team for wanting to do the right thing and going above and beyond so that our patients can have excellent care!

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Team Members honored with this DAISY TEAM Award:

Amber Leal, RN
Noriefel Manuel, RN
Kennethia Wilson, RN
Anna Oconer, RN
MaGracia Frago, RN
David Fischer, RN
Nora Verano, RN
Noemi Domingo, RN
Mercedes Green, RN
Taiwo Roberts, RN
Nina Fullmer, RN
Raven Thomas, RN
Vilma Ramos, RN
Aleyamma Abraham, RN
Emnesty Manuel, RN
Arlene Deguia, RN
Estrella Balledas, RN
Maria Clavejo, RN
Winnie Mencias, RN
Rowena Lendio, RN
Lilia Lacerna, RN
Jesfin Joseph, RN
Etalem Mero, RN
Emily Pepper, RN
Sylvia Capilit, RN
Erika Davila, RN