Wexner Medical Center conducts Socially Distant new nurse education

 

Organization: The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center Brain and Spine Hospital
HESS Components Used: Care Monitor
Other Platforms Utilized: ScreenBeam, Powerpoint

The Story:

 

The challenge involved how to conduct effective onboarding nursing education for a group of new nurses - in an interactive and "active learning" fashion - while maintaining safe social distancing per COVID-19 oriented protocols.

Clinical Educator Kristi Bulkowski used a standard meeting room and projector to enable the portable HESS to bring the learning scenario's to life with vitals on the large screen that Kristi controlled to react to the learner's proposed actions. The learners were masked and safely spaced - but all of them could still see the vitals changing on the projected HESS Care Monitor. The two scenarios Kristi used involved a critical respiratory issue (the respiration rate had dropped to 4 breaths per minute!) and a severe sepsis issue that were based on real prior patient situations.

The HESS was not the "whole show" - but it was a big part of it. Kristi easily switched back and forth between her normal Powerpoint education material on her laptop and the HESS tablet just by quickly switching the HDMI cable for the projector from her laptop to the inexpensive ScreenBeam device that was displaying the HESS Care Monitor tablet screen. She controlled the Care Monitor vitals safely with her HESS Instructor tablet from the side of the room.

For the record, these new nurses were pretty sharp! They worked as a team to correctly assess these complex and increasingly critical situations - and then used their sound judgement to recommend actions to properly address the patient issues. So, with the help of the HESS, the educational objectives were effectively accomplished - amidst COVID-19 precautions - without any special setups or excessive costs.