MultiCare nurses are changing nursing for the better. Through visionary leadership and nursing excellence, they anticipate trends, resolve challenging systems and empower nurses throughout the system.
Transformation is driven by MultiCare’s nursing strategic plan, with a focus on building a strong and vibrant nursing culture, building and sustaining a culture of trust, partnering for high-value individualized care across the continuum, and optimizing fiscal stewardship.
In addition to core transformational work described in the next few pages, successes and highlights include:
- Prioritizing efforts to reduce turnover and burnout. Turnover is well below the national benchmark for nursing. And the annual culture of safety and engagement survey showed strong results, with nurses reporting less burnout and a four-point improvement in the previous year’s burnout and burnout climate categories.
- Strengthening engagement with nurses through listening sessions, town halls, a monthly newsletter and an active nursing portal on MultiCare’s intranet.
- Nurses sharing their best advice about what they wished new nurses already knew and felt today that would help strengthen their practice. From Angela Arnold, RN, BSN, Inland Northwest float pool: “One: Treat your patients like you would want to be treated if you were the patient. Two: If you don’t know, ask! Three: You will make mistakes. Learn from them. Four: You cannot be a productive team member if you are exhausted; extra shifts are nice for the money but too much time clocked in can burn you. Take time off. Five: Keep learning! The more you know, the more you grow.”
- Ashley Brunson, RN, MultiCare Good Samaritan Hospital Family Birth Center, being honored with a Preceptor in Excellence Award for her outstanding contributions in mentoring Highline College nursing students. Her nominator noted: “The trust Ashley placed in me greatly boosted my confidence and created a safe learning environment where I was able to blossom. She has really made me feel that I am right where I am supposed to be on my journey to becoming an RN.”
Teaming up to transform care delivery
Jennifer Graham, Chief Nursing Executive, MultiCare Deaconess & MultiCare Valley Hospitals
Linda Alderson, Chief Nursing Executive, MultiCare Tacoma General & MultiCare Allenmore Hospitals
MultiCare is on a journey to create a strong and vibrant nursing culture. We’re always looking for new ways to improve the nursing experience — a mission made more urgent by significant staffing challenges and resource scarcity faced by our organization and health systems nationwide.
Even before COVID-19, there were cracks in the traditional nursing model. The pandemic gave us an opportunity to ask tough but necessary questions: How can we improve quality, safety and patient outcomes in a rapidly changing landscape? How can we relieve burnout and solve problems nurses face on the job? How can we remove barriers that prevent nurses from doing what they love most, working at the top of their license and spending more time with patients?
And perhaps most important: How can we give nurses back the gift of being a nurse — to be fulfilled in their work and empowered to fully use their expertise, experience, judgment and leadership?
Armed with the vision of our nursing leaders, our long-term strategic plan, the best research, feedback from nursing shared leadership, and information from 52 listening sessions with nurses throughout MultiCare, we started dreaming, discussing and designing.
Our multilayered redesign of nursing at MultiCare weaves in people, technology, workflows and strategic approaches, including:
- Piloting a new integrated care model at MultiCare Deaconess Hospital that teams up RNs, LPNs, CNAs and virtual nurses. The goals of this dynamic model are to reduce the workload for bedside nurses, increase collaboration between caregivers, and provide more personalized, responsive patient care.
- Piloting Moxi robots at Deaconess and MultiCare Tacoma General, MultiCare Mary Bridge Children’s and MultiCare Good Samaritan hospitals to deliver lab samples and run patient medications, supplies and other care items, easing the burden on nurses who would otherwise need to do these tasks and giving them more time at the bedside.
- Improving our technological infrastructure and reducing the time nurses spend on documentation and charting.
- Introducing new strategies to remove variability in care and improve patient safety.
Our pilots use PDSA (plan, do, study, act) principles to test, analyze and adjust changes on a small scale to determine whether they result in improvements. Our approach includes not only evidence-based, scientific aspects but also the human side of change. At each stage, we’ve worked to make sure nurses are listened to and supported.
The early data is encouraging and we’re making progress, but we still have work to do. The Moxi pilot at Deaconess was successful enough to warrant additional rollout at Tacoma General. Its AI system will continue to improve with time — alleviating challenges such as traversing crowded hallways — and will be better positioned to take on simple tasks for nurses and patients.
As we enter the final PDSA cycle stage (decide, adopt, modify or discard) of the care model pilot at Deaconess, we’re focused on improvements highlighted by nurse feedback, like making sure work is better distributed among the care team and expanding the scope of virtual nurses.
The resilience and commitment of the Deaconess nurses involved with the care model pilot haven’t gone unnoticed, as evidenced by their recent MultiCare CEO & President’s Award in the New Knowledge and Innovation category. This award celebrates both their innovative contributions to the care model and their dedication to exceptional patient care under challenging circumstances.
We are so grateful for the pioneering spirit, insights and energy of all nurses involved in the pilots — at Deaconess, Tacoma General, MultiCare Mary Bridge Children’s and MultiCare Good Samaritan hospitals, as well as MultiCare Capital Medical Center. It’s thanks to their collaboration and commitment that we’ve had so many successes and learned so much.
We’re committed to creating an environment that respects, empowers, listens to and supports nurses, aiming to make their daily experience the best it can be.
Moxi in action
- 41,543 deliveries
- Saved staff 13,884,247 steps — the equivalent of 6,487 miles
- 29,817 active hours
- Autonomously opens 2,500+ doors each month
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