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Web site spotlight: Helping hospitals serve older patients: Nurse managers find NICHE

Nurse Leader Weekly, July 14, 2008

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by Barbara Kancelbaum, MSJ

Improving patient care often means seeing it through the eyes of the patient. And that becomes even more crucial if your patients are having trouble seeing the world around them. Some hospitals are experimenting with ways to allow staff members to view the world through the eyes of patients with cataracts.

"More than half of the patients at our hospital are older adults, and they have special needs," says Jane Smeaton, RN, MSOLQ, manager of the medical floor at Waukesha Memorial Hospital in Milwaukee, WI. Since becoming one of the first hospitals to join the national NICHE (Nurses Improving Care for Healthsystem Elders) program in 1999, the facility has taken many steps to serve this need. One includes training sessions where nurses wear vision-distorting glasses to understand what it is like to have cataracts.

NICHE was developed by the Hartford Institute for Geriatric Nursing at NYU College of Nursing, in New York, NY, to help hospitals provide better nursing care to older adults. The number of hospitalized older adults is growing, yet merely 1% of nurses are certified in geriatrics, and many have had little education targeted to this population. NICHE provides hospitals with educational resources, clinical protocols, and organizational models and tools they can customize to fill the gaps in nurses' education.

Editor's Note: This excerpt was adapted from the article, "Helping hospitals serve older patients: Nurse managers find NICHE" featured in The Reading Room on HCPro's new online resource center, www.StrategiesForNurseManagers.com. Get a free trial membership that will give you 30 days to test drive all the exciting features on the Web site.

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