Our hospital has recently decided to disband our Vascular Access team and train a few IR nurses to place devices. They feel that 3-6 successful "pokes" and/or successful line placements will deem the RN competent to be on their own. The team of course feels the learning curve is much greater. Thoughts and/or protocols from other hospitals would be appreciated.
They should be meeting the standard on competency and compatency validation from the INS Standards of Practice. But this does not established a specific number of insertions to establish competecy. Obviously, we both know this is not a good plan. If this action proceeds, there must be some mechanism left in place to measure outcomes produced by this new process and compare them to outcomes produced by the current delivery methods and personnel. Without this comparison, no one will be any wiser about the problems with this approach. I also know that productivity will decline as their success rate will be bad at first due to the learning curve especially with ultraound. Throughput data or the length of time patients must wait for a line insertion along with patient satisfaction must be part of the measurement after the chenge. Lynn
Lynn Hadaway, M.Ed., RN, BC, CRNI
Lynn Hadaway Associates, Inc.
126 Main Street, PO Box 10
Milner, GA 30257
Website http://www.hadawayassociates.com
Office Phone 770-358-7861