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Suzanne is a Service Line Clinical Supervisor for Progressive Care and Family Medicine Units at the University of Missouri Hospital, MU Health Care. She is driven to improve nursing through simple solutions that increase safety and efficiency.
Co-Author: Sean Pridgeon,
DNP, RN, CNL, EBP(CH)
Dr. Pridgeon is the Coordinator of Nursing Research and Evidence-based Practice at MU Health Care in Columbia, MO. He is also a critical care nurse in the US Army Reserves for the 932nd Forward Surgical Team in Indianapolis, IN. Sean's intrinsic interest in nursing has steered him toward building resilience within nursing so that nurses' can take better care of themselves and their patients.
Providing nursing care in a hospital setting is busy, constantly changing, and full of surprises. All these things are amplified when providing care to patients on a Progressive Care Unit (PCU). Patients are stable enough not to require many of the invasive monitoring devices typically seen in an ICU and can seem as healthy as patients on the general care floors. However, their condition can deteriorate rapidly making them the silent critical patient. To further complicate this issue, the average length of stay on a PCU is 4.9 days (Lewis et al., 2017). MU Health Cares PCU is a 30-bed unit with an average daily census of 29. Due to the swift turn around in patients, many PCU nurses are tasked with familiarizing themselves with all new patients every shift. As with any unit at MU Health Care, the first few hours of every shift are full of activity. After receiving the patient report, assessments must be completed, hygiene preformed, out of bed activity achieved, medications administered, multidisciplinary rounds (morning rounds) conducted, and meals offered all within a short period. Some of these tasks have higher risks associated...