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No “Oh No!” Moments: Dole VA Nurses Refine Skills

A nurse trains other clinical staff on CHG bathing during a recent competency forum at Dole VA.
Daisy Pham, an RN in Dole VA's Intensive Care Unit (ICU), instructs other staff on CHG bathing, an important tool in the quest to protect Veterans from hospital-acquired infections (HAIs). The training and competency validation took place May 13-14 during National Nurses Week.

By Dole VA Office of Communication Services

Nurses provide care at every stage of life—from birth through death—supporting wellness, managing acute and chronic illnesses, and providing palliative or end-of-life care.

Assessing patients, providing wound care and changing dressings, and starting and maintaining peripheral intravenous (IV) lines to provide fluids, medications, or nutrition are some of the (shall we call them) routine tasks they perform.

Because of their diverse and essential mission within health care, nurses - as well as health techs and certified nurse assistants (CNAs) - must demonstrate compliance with Joint Commission expectations through continued competence in areas of low frequency and high risk. That is, events that don’t occur often but, when they do, pose a substantial threat to the health of the patient.

As a component of that perpetual training effort, Dole VA Education Department held a Nurses Competency Forum on May 13 and 14, in connection with National Nurses Week activities.

“In past years, this was organized by the inpatient nurse managers for their staff,” said Jeffrey Steinert, Nurse Educator. “This year, though, Education agreed to take it on as part of a partnership with that group. While acquiring SME’s (Subject Matter Experts), some of the other nursing service lines asked to join in. Since many of nursing’s competencies overlap, the pool of participants significantly expanded.”

Competency topics provided this year included safe patient handling; crash cart training and assessment; LUCAS training and assessment; CHG Bathing (a process that reduces the spread of infections in hospital settings); restraint application and removal; stroke/BEFAST review; falls prevention; IO access (a way to give lifesaving medicines or fluids through the bone when a regular IV can’t be started quickly, especially in emergencies); central line management; chest tube management; and Midwest transplant review. Over the course of the two days, 142 nurses and nurse aides successfully completed all required competencies.

“I appreciated the engagement of the nursing team as a whole,” Steinert shared. “The participants were quite engaged in the process.  The SME’s who ran each of the stations demonstrated a high level of expertise in each of their respective areas, and I especially enjoyed the fact that Cath Lab and the Interventional Radiology nurses joined in and supported.”

After this first year of the Education team taking the lead and spearheading orchestration of the competency forum, Clinical Nurse Educator Chloe Ciero-LaCrosse is already excited for next year.

“The new and innovative format we employed; the collaboration, dedication, and support of teams and departments across the facility; the wealth of data, invaluable staff feedback, and vital takeaways we've gathered from this event, we’re looking forward to making next year’s forum even better.”