industry & policy
Emergency room for improvement
A nurse-led initiative to improve the care of older people in emergency departments is garnering praise.
Marianne Wallis interviewed by Dallas Bastian
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Queensland nursing project focused on providing quicker and more personalised treatment to older patients has received a state award.
The Geriatric Emergency Department Intervention( GEDI) won the customer focus category at the 2016 Queensland Premier’ s Awards for Excellence.
The project is a joint effort between the University of the Sunshine Coast( USC), Nambour Hospital and the Sunshine Coast Hospital and Health Service. It was developed by USC nursing academics and a team of nurses and doctors with specialist geriatric experience.
GEDI aims to decrease hospital and emergency admission rates for elderly people and reduce their length of stay, while improving staff and patient satisfaction.
Professor of nursing Marianne Wallis, who heads the GEDI team at USC, said emergency departments can be confusing, noisy and dangerous places for frail older people.
“ We’ re making sure they spend as little time as possible in that environment, and can quickly access the specific kind of care they need,” Wallis said.
“ The preliminary results of the project are so encouraging that we have already received state funding to have this program rolled out on a wider scale.”
GEDI is part of a larger project that aims to strengthen the capacity of the aged-care sector and improve interaction between aged-care facilities and hospitals.
Aged Care Insite sits down with Wallis to find out how GEDI helps to reduce the length of people’ s hospital stays and how other hospitals or health services can be involved in the project.
ACI: What does GEDI set out to do and what role do nurses play in delivering the intervention? MW: GEDI is an intervention situated in the emergency department that is predominantly nurseled, but has a physician champion. We have a clinical nurse consultant and a number of clinical nurses who basically fast-track and improve the care for older people if they have to come into an emergency department, particularly the frail older person.
What are the key elements of the program that have led to its success? I think there are a couple of aspects that have led to its success. This is a real bundled intervention. The nurses, first of all, they screen patients and work out who are the frail aged. They can then do a more in-depth assessment and liaise very quickly and effectively with emergency doctors and geriatricians and a whole host of other allied health and diagnostic services to get a real fast track on care. And because they are experts in both emergency and gerontology nursing, they are also a great resource for all of the staff.
I think the fact that this service is seen as a key supporting resource within our ED is one of the elements of success. There is great buy-in from all of the ED clinicians around this particular service delivery model.
The other key element of success is that the clinicians partnered with a university so that we can help them get really rigorous research results out of this and show just how well this works. People understand that it’ s a common sense idea, and although it’ s about diverting resources from one place to another, the clinicians and the hospital service administrators are already seeing the benefits, even before the research is finalised.
12 agedcareinsite. com. au