Sabrina Diffendaffer
February 2024
Sabrina
Diffendaffer
,
MSN, RN
Behavioral Health Unit
Swedish Medical Center - Ballard
Seattle
,
WA
United States

 

 

 

Sabrina has done truly amazing work during her year and a half at Providence Swedish Ballard. Through all of this, she remains a humble servant leader, quick to give credit to others. We are so proud to have her as a colleague.
Nurse Leaders drive team development, resiliency, and competency, ensuring their team members are meaningfully recognized for the work they do for patients and families. Ethical behavior is modeled and supported.  Sabrina is often the first to “recognize teams and caregivers” during our daily campus “huddles” to make sure individuals are called out to the broader system.  She has embraced team building and cross training with other units at our site.  Sabrina continually encourages and recognizes her team. She is quick to celebrate wins and is also realistic in providing specifics about needs for change, always in a respectful way.  Sabrina worked hard to reduce overall turnover from 29% in 2022 to 21% in 2023. Her unit First Year turnover is an outstanding 11% which reflects her leadership and engagement with her team.  Sabrina stays connected with her team in person (both night and day shift) and with weekly summaries. She recognizes and appreciates their excellence and shares concrete opportunities for improvement. Nurse Leaders provide a haven of safety for staff, both physically and emotionally.  Her Caregiver Engagement Highly Sustainably Engaged score increased from 26% in 2022 to 64% in 2023. She works closely with her team to address issues and concerns reported in the survey.  Sabrina has engaged in implementing the campus wide “Code Grey” initiative, which provides more support to our behavioral health population and supporting units to manage escalated patient situations.  Sabrina co-teaches De-Escalation classes throughout the Central Region. The class is open to all staff, clinical or otherwise. These classes have been a critical part of changing the culture to one that focuses on person-centered interactions, trauma informed care, and positive interactions and outcomes. Nurse Leaders ensure standards of quality patient care are maintained.  For 2023, Sabrina’s Behavioral Health unit patient rating for the "treatment helpful" metric was 90%.  Sabrina has an active Shared Leadership Team who are very involved in changes and improvements for patient processes and staff care and development. The unit medical director actively participates in this group which is unique. 2023 projects included implementation of nurse-facilitated Epic Safety Plans, enhancing nursing led groups, the full implementation of a new hand-off tool, development of new resources and the use of one of the group rooms during "downtime" to enhance patient engagement and treatment focus.  Patient engagement work includes nurse-facilitated walks, games group, and facilitating the goals group. The addition of evening wrap-up or goals follow-up has been a significant benefit to our patients. She recognized her NAC team for their amazing work supporting groups, especially the morning goals group. All of this work clearly benefits our patients. Problem-solving and encouraging critical thinking.  Sabrina leverages her extensive experience in nursing leadership and clinical instruction to bring new and innovative care models to her unit.  Her team partnered with the Quality Team to do a Corrective Action Project related to patient self-harm on the unit. Staff were highly engaged and now flag patients at increased risk for self-harm on the rounds board, tracking "days since " to increase attention and awareness and discussing resources to specifically support individuals at increased risk for self-harm.  Sabrina sends out a comprehensive weekly update to be able to make sure her team receives information about organizational changes so they can find the support they need to provide the best patient care. Sabrina has done truly amazing work during her year and a half at Providence Swedish Ballard. Through all of this, she remains a humble servant leader, quick to give credit to others. We are so proud to have her as a colleague.