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Spice up staff information with hot peppers

Nurse Leader Weekly, November 20, 2006

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There are numerous ways to spread information around a hospital. Posters clutter walls and doors, newsletters fill inboxes and mailboxes, and e-mails fly through cyberspace at a dizzying pace everyday. No wonder a giant, bright, red hot pepper hanging on a wall garners lots of attention at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas.

"We're calling it hot topics for nurses," says Chris Geyer, RN, MSN, an educational specialist at Baylor. "It's a communication tool. It's a creative way to disseminate quick, succinct information."

The point of the pepper is to convey the hospital's most pertinent ideas, topics, and updates from the educators to the approximately 1,400 nurses at the 997-bed facility in northeast Texas.

Deciding what to put on the pepper was no easy task. The answer was to use small, short paragraphs on organization-wide topics that were essential to nurses.

If staff want to read more about a topic, there is a notebook filled with additional resources near each pepper. Whether the information is on the pepper or in the notebook, the educators have stayed away from posting anything that would be specific only to certain units. "We don't want to burden people with things they don't need," Geyer says. "They don't have time."

The pepper is typically covered with organization-wide issues including the following:

• New standing order sets
• New or changed policies
• New procedures
• New products/equipment
• Nursing practice issues (including quality improvement)

Keeping the peppers fresh

The content on the peppers changes monthly. Because several educators work on the project, two are responsible for switching out the information.

"Where to post [the peppers] is a challenge," says Geyer. "The layouts in the units are so different. Sometimes we place them in a conference room, sometimes in a break room, and sometimes in a medication room."

Wherever they are, staff now recognize and look for them, says Nurse Educator Holly Wright, RN, MSN. "It took a couple of months, but now on every unit, everyone knows what [the peppers are]," she says.

Wright says nurses like the peppers because they are designed and hung just for them.

"It's specifically geared just to nurses," she says. "It's not for physicians, residents, or family guests."

Editor's note: This excerpt was adapted from The Staff Educator, November 2006, HCPro, Inc.

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