Award-winning Delaware Nurse Administrator Linda Laskowski Jones
Monday July 14, 2008
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Linda Laskowski Jones, RN, MS, APRN, BC, CCRN, CEN
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"It helps make interactions with the VP nonthreatening," Jones says. "I never want to feel like I don't know what it's like within the department, what the nurses are experiencing on a day-to-day basis."
For example, Christiana Care's two acute care facilities, Christiana Hospital — Delaware's only Level 1 trauma center — and Wilmington Hospital, see 350 and 150 patients, respectively, in their EDs each day. In an effort to improve efficiency and patient care, Jones collaborated with a council of nurse manager and physician colleagues to adopt a system called EDTracker. The software shows the location of patients, staff, and critical equipment within the boundaries of the ED.
Launched in November 2004 at Christiana and in April 2006 at Wilmington, EDTracker allows staff to look up patient names, their chief complaints, and lab and radiology results, as well as a log of their interactions with nurses.
"The implementation of EDTracker gave me the greatest feeling of accomplishment," Jones says. "We can't live without it now."
The council meets weekly to look at the current processes and offer suggestions to streamline the approach to patient care. "We collect data [on each idea] and analyze it before deciding to roll it out to the whole group," Jones says. "In some cases, we have been able to reduce wait time 50 percent to 60 percent," Jones says.
Jones is pleased with her staff's commitment to the project. She recently spent a week away from Christiana Hospital at a conference, and the new routines continued successfully in her absence. "If staff are going to take it and run with it, you know it's becoming part of the culture," Jones says.
"I love public speaking," she says. "I think it comes from enjoying the whole practice area. Emergency and trauma are truly my passions."
Jones has taught clinical courses for the University of Delaware, her alma mater, and the trauma nursing core course for Widener University in Chester, Pa. At Christiana Hospital she teaches CPR, advanced cardiac life support, pediatric cardiac life support, and trauma nursing.
In 2007, Sigma Theta Tau recognized Jones' contributions to nursing with the Marie Hippensteel Lingeman Award for Excellence in Nursing Practice, one of the International Nursing Honor Society's Founders Awards. Among the achievements that contributed to Jones receiving this award are her role as president of the Delaware Board of Nursing from 1994 to 1997 and her work with teams that earned nurses prescriptive authority in Delaware and created a statewide trauma system in the mid-1990s.
Marina DeScenza Walker is a freelance writer. To comment, e-mail editorPA@nursingspectrum.com.
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