WOW Projects Does Your Hospital Do These?

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Hello, All! Long time listener, first time caller. LOL Question for you veterans as I am a new BSN/RN.

I was just hired by a Level II community (& newly designated children's) hospital that is participating in this concept of the WOW Project, the brain child of Tom Peters, the uber-guru of the business world. They are basically QI projects of sorts. (Give it a google if so inclined.) All new hires are required to come up a project. (My head is spinning just starting as a new nurse, being competent enough to be a blessing to my patients. . .but now I have to WOW someone. . .okedoke.)

I was wondering if anyone else has designed a WOW project, has any experience at all with these, or if you have any ideas to share. It can be any aspect of the hospital! (To further narrow it down for you. . .)

I have a few ideas but am not sure where to go with them, so any brainstorming/suggestions is appreciated:

  • Reward/Recognition program for employees of some type.
  • Becoming more child friendly (as this designation of "Children's Hospital" is brand spanking new)
  • CBL on Emotional Intelligence to be included in CE
  • Some sort of outreach program to assist local schools since school nurses are becoming a thing of the past d/t budget constraints; Maybe a "Teaching Day", etc., promotes us as a Children's Hospital
  • Any project related to a Pediatric/PICU unit
  • Way to tap donors for little extras for our Peds Hematology Oncology Unit patients

Again, grasping at straws here because I don't even know enough yet about the inner workings of a unit and hospital to come up with more! (My forte has been more EBP Research...but that is not what they are looking for here.)

Happy to be a part of the on-line community and am grateful for the help!

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Sheesh, it's not like you have time on your hands or anything. They should do that "girlscout badge" earning stuff at a later date.

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Specializes in SICU/CVICU.

From what I understand about these projects, they need to be a little more concrete than you describe.

After reading about this online some things that come to mind are:

--an outreach to provide helmuts for bicycle riders

--an outreach alcohol abatement program

--partnering with the driver ed programs in the area to provide speakers re alcohol

--depending upon the area you are in, a weekend of health screening for HTN, diabetes and/or prostate cancer

Good Luck

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Specializes in ICU.

My manager wanted me involved in similar crap for magnet status. Can't - I work nightshift. Wanted me to do a unit scrapbook (yeah right). I told him that it should be enough that I do my job, working without a break for 12 hours.

Is this the same jerk who wrote the book "If your hospital were run by Disney." What a crock.

Think of a topic you need to learn about, keep it super simple, like PEG tube care or flushing a PICC line. Write a parent education sheet, stick a happy face on it, you're done. Everybody's happy.

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Specializes in Oncology; medical specialty website.

Figures this was developed by a business guru. Someone with absolutely no clue what nursing is about.

Whatever happened to the days when a nurse could just come to work, take care of patients and go home? Now they have to make posters/scrapbooks and all sorts of other busy work.

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Specializes in L&D, OBED, NICU, Lactation.

I had to do a project similar to this when I was at the end of my new graduate residency. My group focused on error prevention for new graduate nurses. It was not that hard and pretty fun actually. The hardest part can be making sure you have protected time in which to work on it. I fail to see how facilities can be expecting their staff to do things like this without removing them from the numbers to allow them to do so.

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Specializes in L&D, OBED, NICU, Lactation.
Whatever happened to the days when a nurse could just come to work, take care of patients and go home? Now they have to make posters/scrapbooks and all sorts of other busy work.

Poster/scrapbooks aside, those days are gone. We can no longer work in a vacuum because it benefits no one. We as nurses have to see ourselves as part of a larger system and work together with each other and the rest of the organization to meet the patient's needs.

I am actually going the opposite way...nursing into business because there is such a lack of understanding of what nurses do and a lack of a strong voice when such management decisions are being made.

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Specializes in Oncology; medical specialty website.
Poster/scrapbooks aside, those days are gone. We can no longer work in a vacuum because it benefits no one. We as nurses have to see ourselves as part of a larger system and work together with each other and the rest of the organization to meet the patient's needs.

With fewer staff and more patients with more needs. I wouldn't call giving patient care "working in a vacuum." I'd call it prioritizing.

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Specializes in L&D, OBED, NICU, Lactation.
With fewer staff and more patients with more needs. I wouldn't call giving patient care "working in a vacuum." I'd call it prioritizing.

By working in a vacuum, I meant not looking beyond that patient, right now, on this shift. You can still think about the bigger picture even if you have more to do. It sounds like the system around you has failed to meet the needs of both employees and patients, which makes it harder to fix but not an unattainable goal.

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From what I understand about these projects, they need to be a little more concrete than you describe.

After reading about this online some things that come to mind are:

--an outreach to provide helmuts for bicycle riders

--an outreach alcohol abatement program

--partnering with the driver ed programs in the area to provide speakers re alcohol

--depending upon the area you are in, a weekend of health screening for HTN, diabetes and/or prostate cancer

Good Luck

Yes, all done ten times over in our area. I did initially consider some sort of community outreach/education program but these, such as you've suggested, have been in place. And also many are being discontinued d/t cost and lack of interest. Which has me wondering, should I invest the time (outside of work hours) to design an education program that hasn't been done, would it even be implemented with no funds available. Also, nurses in our area start at just $19/hr (BSN, RN) and max at about $25. Not a lot of incentive to go the extra mile I suppose which is sad. Kind of hard to deliver major WOW factor with no budget for anything. LOL

Much of the staff tell me they are probably looking for more cost reduction/efficiency type projects with this whole initiative, ways to save and yet improve. But again, without knowing much about daily operations and such yet. . .I'm clueless! I don't think newly hired fresh-from-college BSNs are necessarily the right folks to tap to deliver that.

Thanks for the reply.

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Specializes in tele, oncology.

We have a board on our unit that is changed quarterly that serves to educate our visitors/patients about different stuff...but it's all geared toward those PG scores. We've had them on bedside reporting, fall prevention, etc. It's really something that looks more appropriate for a fifth grade classroom (think cutesy fonts and borders) but the audience seems to like it. Maybe you could come up with a year's worth of ideas for something similar and recruit some artsy-craftsy co-workers to help put them up? Pretty much anything mgmt can do to get scores up they'll pounce on, no matter how farfetched it sounds (unless it involves increasing staffing).

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Specializes in ICU.

This is off topic but I am going to say it anyway. I have been a nurse since 1984, in ICU for 13 yrs, and I know my stuff. Over the last three months all of the charge nurses had to re-apply for their positions. Women with 30+ years of solid experience were replaced with the young women whom we had trainedand mentored after graduation to be nurses. This shows a terrible lack of respect on the part of the employer. The relatively new nurses were pressured into applying for charge nurse positions that they neither wanted, nor were fully prepared to accept. It has been awkward to say the least. You new graduates are being molded into good subservient workers who don't talk back..

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