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namesake of the School’s Eileen S. Meyer Endowed Nursing Scholarship, agrees. Meyer earned her Master of Science in Nursing degree from the School in 1997 and is currently a DNP student. “I look at it not only from the nurse practitioner’s standpoint, but also as a graduate student. As part of the Partnership, Dean Harper has given us the green light to structure an NP residency program so that the new graduates will be totally immersed in his or her first role as a nurse practitioner,” Meyer said. “The partnership between the hospital and the SON will benefit the students “The reality is and the hospital in that we are willing to provide that the physicians are not in NP students with an contact with the patients as exceptional residency experience so that their much as bedside nurses. Nurses residents may develop are an integral part of the team the skills needed to care for any patient, in any effort to take care of patients...” setting, in any hospital. -Dr. Loring Rue The benefit to the hospital will be recruitment of these new graduates and ease of transition to practice. Working together we can train great nurses and nurse practitioners who are highly skilled and ready to make their mark on the health care profession.”
A Total Team Approach The importance of participating in the UAB Nursing Partnership is recognized by the Health System’s physicians as well. Professor of Surgery and UAB Chief Medical Officer Loring W. Rue, III, MD, FACS, who served on the advisory committee that helped launch the more formal partnership, said, “It is an acknowledgment of the importance of the whole health care team being 10
UAB NURSING / FALL 2016
UAB Chief Medical Officer Dr. Loring Rue served on the advisory committee that helped launch the Partnership.
partners in providing the best care for patients.” As we move into the 21st century, the entire health care team must focus on collaboration if the desired result, quality patient care and outcomes, is to be achieved. “Years and years ago, the world revolved around physicians,” Rue said. “Now the patient still comes to the hospital and is admitted to a physician, but I think physicians are increasingly recognizing that if we didn’t have our nursing colleagues, our pharmacy colleagues and all our other health professional colleagues, we'd compromise the quality care we provide. “The reality is that the physicians are not in contact with the patients as much as bedside nurses. Nurses are an integral part of the team effort to take care of patients, and I’m fully convinced that working alongside our nursing colleagues in full partnership, and developing solutions to quality and safety issues at the bedside, is going to give us the best chance of improving quality of care even more in the future.” Rue believes part of the reason the UAB Nursing Partnership is already seeing success is that the medical landscape at UAB has evolved to the point that its nurses feel empowered to voice concerns about issues related to quality patient care, and as the partnership expands it will only increase that dialogue. “That is called promoting a culture of safety,” Rue said. “If we want that kind of culture, then anybody who has concerns about a clinical-care issue should be free to raise that issue and be empowered to suggest how to correct it. “If a nurse says ‘I think we have a problem with this patient’ or ‘they’re having a reaction to that medicine,’ it is incumbent on us as physicians to take that seriously. That is how a partnership works.”