Letter from CNO, SVP Mairead Hickey

Dear Colleagues:

Developing the professional practice environment in which we can provide excellent care to all patients and families with the best staff in the safest environment remains a high priority for the Department of Nursing. In a positive practice environment nurses have access to and utilize the best evidence available on behalf of their particular patient and are guided by the circumstances and preferences of the patient, so that information and evidence is used to improve the quality of nursing judgments.

However, our responsibility goes beyond access and use of evidence-based information. Our responsibility as BWH nurses also includes adding to the body of evidence available. BWH Nurse reports on some of the many ways this currently happens, from the evidence-based measurement of body temperature in late pre-term infants in the NICU to planning and caring for the complex needs of Mr. Jim Maki, our first face transplant patient, to Kate Sullivan’s experiences in Rwanda as BWH’s first Global Nursing fellow.

Every day, nurses at BWH learn more about their own practice, raise important clinical questions about patient care and translate their new learning to benefit the care of their patients, while contributing to our discipline specific knowledge.

In this issue of BWH Nurse, we celebrate the first $1million gift (the largest single gift to date) to the Department of Nursing. This gift will fund the Steven and Kathleen Haley Nurse Scientist Program and bring Haley Nurse Scientists who are faculty at the Boston College William F. Connell School of Nursing to BWH to engage in clinical nursing research activities. It also will provide time for participating BWH clinical nurses to engage in scholarly work and will facilitate rich dialogue through an annual Haley Nursing forum.

The Haley Nurse Scientist Program will provide us with new and expanding opportunities to answer the questions raised by nurses at the bedside, and it will generate new nursing knowledge, help us apply evidence based knowledge in the care of patients and families and assure our Department of Nursing establishes itself as a leader locally and nationally. This gift is another acknowledgement by donors of the care you provide every day to your patients and families. It is another statement of the confidence that BWH nurses are on the forefront of discovering new knowledge, implementing best practices and improving patient care.

We also celebrate in this issue of BWH Nurse the results of the last two Press Ganey surveys, revealing that BWH nurses placed at the 99th percentile of the ninety teaching hospitals of similar size that use Press Ganey to measure patient satisfaction, another example of our ongoing commitment and dedication to patients and families.

My appreciation goes to each of you. As your chief nurse, I work hard to listen to your voice and, to be sure I—together with all of you—am advancing our work and creating a practice environment for clinical excellence that is characterized by mutual respect and collaboration. I am and always have been proud to call myself a BWH nurse!