Nurse Practitioner Cleveland Clinic, United States
Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic taught us many things, including collaborative work in the intensive care unit (ICU) and heightened the awareness of wellbeing of healthcare workers. Despite that, there was a lot of burn-out in all fields, including nursing, creating a large shortage. Traditionally, the most experienced nurses train the new graduates and shape their critical thinking in the ICU. However, the attrition resulted in fewer nurse trainers, and nurses with less critical care experience train their to-be peers. The aim of this project was to improve the critical thinking and comfort of both new graduates and seasoned nurses on a Medical Intensive Care Unit through weekly education rounds.
Methods: Initial forms of education were discussion on rounds. They then lead to a 5-minute verbal lecture at the nursing station by the physician or advanced practice provider on the topic of their choice. We broadened our approach by using Informal PowerPoint presentations with demonstration. The nurses were given a blank chart to write down topics, during their huddle, they desired to learn on. We then chose to assess the benefit of this mode of physician and advanced practice provider led teaching, in the form of an anonymous survey.
Results: Thirty-three intensive care unit nurses responded to post presentation survey. Of those that responded 96% rated “Teaching Tuesdays” improved their confidence with provider interaction. Within the same group a response of 88.4% rated their critical thinking has improved since the start of “Teaching Tuesdays”.
Conclusions: There was increase in confidence in both new graduates and seasoned nurses when it comes to critical thinking in the Medical Intensive Care Unit. This helps to improve the job satisfaction as a bedside nurse. This theoretically improves patient care, with cohesively delivered medical care. It also helped to improve upon the relationship between nurses and providers, as it lessened the apprehension to approach a provider with questions. There are limited publications that touch upon nurse-doctor co-teaching. By continuing our unique education model, in the world of critical care, we support more establishments of physician and advanced practice provider teaching of nurses to benefit healthcare and healthcare workers job satisfaction in the long run.
