Nursing Careers in Health Making: How healthcare leaders can energize and retain their creative workforce
Anna Young
Founder. Invention Lab Maker. Space rocket launcher. Stealth medical device empowerment.
While attempting to use a new filament, Rose Hedges changes the build plate temperature settings on the 3D printer with the same confidence that she adjusts the drip rate of her patients’ infusion pumps in the ICU. Trained as a Critical Care nurse, Rose is the Nursing Research and Innovation Coordinator at UnityPoint Health - St. Luke’s Hospital. Over the past 10 years, Rose’s nursing responsibilities at St. Luke’s Hospital have evolved from bedside care, to informatics and research, and most recently, managing the generate lab, St. Luke’s hospital makerspace. On any given week, you will find Rose caring for the most critical patients in the ICU, training new employees on additive manufacturing or hosting events on the units to solicit new ideas from frontline teams.
Rose is an example of a career trajectory in a healthcare system that rewards creative, innovative work to enhance the patient care side of nursing practice.?Her role, spanning direct patient care and the development of clinician-led health technology, is powerful. Operating at this intersection provides a unique, and much needed, opportunity to engage her frontline peers in innovation projects that tackle clinical challenges and revive the spark in a wavering workforce.??
Current surveys show that almost 1 in 3 nurses are intending to leave patient care. Almost 1 million nurses across the US. The emotional toll. The burn out. The paycheck that mismatches their effort in patient care. It adds up to an advertisement that says LEAVE. And is a dim picture of what newspapers are calling essential. Hospitals have spent an estimated $24 billion to address this staffing shortage. Healthcare system leaders that feel the profound impact of this crisis are designing new strategies and initiatives to support and provide engaging opportunities for nurses?at the bedside. The time is now to untap the potential of nurse-led creativity in the road to recovery from an exhausted workforce.
Typically, nurse innovation roles in a health system are centralized, administrative-level positions. However, while these positions provide a vision, that's not how innovation is put into practice. It’s distinct from an auditing or the ombudsman’s office. Innovation thrives when it is pervasive. What would healthcare look like if every speciality within a healthcare system had an embedded MakerNurse Champion like Rose?
MakerNurse Champion
A nursing position engaged in daily patient care, but with dedicated time and resources to pursue and promote health technology innovation projects with their peers.?
These multi-faceted nursing positions keep the best minds helping patients while also giving them resources to pursue their creative ideas. This means that nurses do not have to leave the bedside or the profession to practice and lead technology-centric innovation. Creating more multi-faceted nursing positions, like Rose’s, would lead to powerful communities of energized and engaged nurses. This is a critical to consider in a nursing workforce that is dwindling and exporting talent to other fields, jeopardizing the quality of patient care. We believe leadership must create these opportunities for nurses to practice innovation as a defined responsibility within their job description.
To help healthcare system leaders create these opportunities for nurses, we have outlined three attainable qualities of an environment suitable for a MakerNurse Champion:
On the clock time: Dedicated hours to pursue innovation projects built into the job description & responsibilities
To embed the hands-on problem solving mindset into nursing positions, Taiwan Adventist Hospital trains all new nurses on creativity and health technology invention. Frontline nursing teams regularly hold meetings to identify challenges and brainstorm solutions. Oftentimes, these solutions require novel hardware that gets crafted by the nurses themselves with the right set of tools and materials. The hospital leadership has found that giving nurses full autonomy to pursue these projects increases their passion for the nursing profession.?
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Stuff that builds: A suite of tools, materials, and training to bring their and their peers’ ideas to life.
UnityPoint Health - St. Luke’s Hospital launched a health technology makerspace on the first floor of the hospital. The prototyping resources are open access to all staff and are often brought to the unit for real-time prototyping. When staff see a challenge, they know exactly where to go to start solving it.?They have the toolbox to bring real things to life and the permission to experiment.
Having your back: Leadership recognizes innovative nurses and their projects, promoting their value and impact to clinician peers, managers, and the health system’s patient community
When the University of Texas Medical Branch created a campaign to highlight the noteworthy projects across campus, a nurse-made IV line cover was featured right next to the Zika diagnostic research. This signals that the organization and leadership are proud to highlight a diverse portfolio of internal accomplishments.??
If you are working in patient care today, what is your ideal role and responsibility? What's missing to get you there to that ideal role? Who needs to initiate that work? How can your healthcare system leadership support your professional growth?
Now more than ever, healthcare needs motivated, creative nurses to lead the redesign of patient care. Our team at MakerHealth is here to partner with healthcare systems to promote this pathway to reimagine the nursing workforce. Our work together will leverage the innate creative qualities of frontline teams and expand clinician toolsets with the know how to create new health technology at the point of care.
Founder, CEO @ RoddyMedical, Inc. | PhD Candidate | Focused on Nurse Driven Medical Devices for Improved Patient Safety and Outcomes
2 年Rose Hedges, I have so much appreciation and respect for what you are doing at Unity Point with your hospital MakerSpace! You inspire me. Anna Young, this is incredible and so needed. I am very passionate about elevating the nursing voice in medical device development, testing, and design. However, I found the learning curve to be steep (though surmountable with the right people and resources). Inspired by an incident that almost cost a patient of mine his life, I took the plunge into this world of devices, and this is where I want to be the rest of my career. Developing our medical device was a trial by fire, but so worth it now that it is actually being utilized with patients. Keep up this inspiring work please! This is so great! We need this!
?? Nurse Innovator at Children's National Hospital | Alliance for Pediatric Device Innovation
2 年Maker Spaces. Brilliant! I’m a nurse innovator at Children’s National Hospital in Washington DC. I joined our Shared Nursing Leadership Resource & Innovation Council and shared an idea I had for a medical device. They chose my idea to further develop with our Biodesign Program Director, Jules Sherman. She led our team of nurses through the design thinking model and the processes of moving devices and new technologies to market. Within 2 years, we went from paper to prototype and are about to embark on an IRB study that will help provide value analysis data for potential commercialization. Our program is proof that there is room for nursing innovation at the table. I think it’s difficult for organizations to fund these types of programs, especially when most are grant funded. The economic potential for new technologies is on fire right now. Sponsorship and investments from philanthropists and larger companies could be the catalyst to bust the doors to innovation wide open. This is just the beginning. I’d love to see more nurses getting involved here. We’ve talked about the idea of Maker Spaces, I’d love to connect and discuss.
Would love to have more education and the healthcare sector to resemble maker spaces on site ... How to gain traction?
Nurse | Inventor | SafeSeizure? | Co-Founder - Frontier Innovations, Inc.
2 年Me and Taofiki Gafar-Schaner, MSN, RN get asked by nurses constantly how to start an idea. We also get asked by hospital leadership how can they foster innovation within their system. The answer is MakerHealth and Anna Young can show you the way. Anna, I'm so grateful for the work you've done and continue to do around nurse/healthcare innovation. I can't wait to see these benefits with my own two eyes! ??
Nursing Research & Innovation Coordinator DNP, RN at UnityPoint Health Cedar Rapids
2 年My leadership team has always listened to my ideas and asked, how do you think we could make that happen, instead of saying we can't focus on that right now. My CNO has been open to allowing me to "prove the value" of new project ideas through pilot programs. A great example was starting with a mobile innovation lab, I was able to prove the value this brought to our nurses and our hospital.... fast forward we now have makerspace in the hospital!