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Feature Stories

Wockhardt nursing initiative builds on momentum

News of its innovative cardiology services, attractiveness to foreign patients, and rapid growth have made longtime HMI partner Wockhardt Hospitals Limited (WHL) emblematic of health care systems development in South Asia. Yet the cross-network collaborative efforts of its nursing staff may be Wockhardt’s most impressive claim to regional leadership.

As Wockhardt continues to pursue an aggressive growth strategy—several new hospitals are in the works, and the network is looking to roll out a wide range of highly specialized clinical programs—its senior clinical and administrative leaders are working with HMI to address the challenges associated with professional staff development, particularly in the area of nursing.

Last year Wockhardt launched a year-long initiative designed to enhance nursing leadership, with help from HMI’s Elizabeth Brown, MSN, RN, MBA, Director of Clinical Services. Brown said that as Wockhardt continues to develop its clinical offerings, it must address an ever growing need for highly skilled nurses. “As the network grows, it is important to make sure that we have the right infrastructure for leadership development, competency building, and quality improvement within the system,” said Brown.

In November Elizabeth Joseph, RN, Nursing Superintendent at WHL, completed a three-week development program at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC). Under the mentorship  of Patricia Folcarelli, RN, PhD, Director of Professional Practice Development at the hospital, Ms. Joseph explored the operational, administrative, and clinical backbones supporting BIDMC’s programs in emergency medicine, critical care, and transplantation. She arrived in Boston eager to gather knowledge and insight into what each clinical program demanded in terms of nursing competencies, ongoing training and development, and the structuring of the care team. In addition, her complex program was designed to produce input on key principles underlying such programs and hospital-based care in general, such as leadership, organization and governance, and nursing’s impact on quality improvement and patient safety assurance.

Ms. Joseph’s impressions of BIDMC reflected a great deal of how she hopes the Wockhardt network will advance nursing. Observing BIDMC’s critical care and emergency departments, she saw examples of structured care models in which each team member understands his or her roles and performs them with precision. “The nursing team at BIDMC has strong support in carrying out day-to-day activities, which helps them to spend more quality time with the patient and actually do more nursing,” she said.

Team-focused care models will help strengthen nursing at the bedside and on the wards, but what about in the conference rooms, where important discussions and decisions by nurses can occur to influence nursing’s impact on the wider organization? Ms. Joseph and other members of the Wockhardt leadership team are keen to develop a shared governance structure that will help facilitate information-sharing across the network, formalize input into education and training, and enhance nursing’s role in quality improvement and patient safety—an area where Wockhardt’s nurses have already made an indelible mark.

In recent months Brown, Joseph, Folcarelli and other nurses at Wockhardt have been collaborating on the development of quality dashboards designed to enable all of the Wockhardt hospitals to measure and compare performance and efficiency related to a number of clinical issues. One such issue under scrutiny is pressure ulcers. Wockhardt’s central nursing leadership group began tracking them with help from the network’s infection control nurses. Together they created a more standardized tool for the assessment of pressure ulcers, and communicated the incidence of pressure ulcers to nursing staff in each unit. Documentation led to action on the part of ward managers, and before long the lessons from this project were being applied across the Wockhardt system in a way that is truly unique in Indian health care. Joseph and others presented their work on pressure ulcers at the 2007 Hospital Management Asia conference, and took home a top prize in the category of patient safety and quality improvement.