Nurses Leading the Transformation of Patient Care Through Telehealth.

The essential role of nurses in leading, developing, and improving Lehigh Valley Health Network (LVHN) telehealth services and programs was a key reason the organization was selected to receive the American Nurses Credentialing Center 2013 Magnet® Prize. This article describes the application of telehealth as a nurse-led technology. The innovations within LVHN telehealth services are presented as well as essential success factors of design, implementation, and evaluation.

Friends of nursing: a community of caring to promote excellence in nursing practice, education, and research.

More than 25 years ago, the name "Friends of Nursing" was adopted by an academic, community Magnet(®) hospital to signify a model for community support of nursing. From inception, the intent was to recruit philanthropic dollars to promote recognition of and excellence in nursing practice, education, and research. Although philanthropy in health care settings is common, what is unique about this program is the long-standing, dedicated conceptual framework for nursing philanthropy and the very significant number of philanthropic dollars from literally thousands of donors to support a diverse range of activities to affect and advance the professional excellence of nurses and the quality of patient care.

Development of a reliable and valid organization-specific professional practice assessment tool.

Purpose: This article describes a study to devise an organization-specific professional practice model (PPM) assessment that reflects actual unit involvement. A secondary study goal is the development of a unit-based index that can be used to conduct comparative analyses in an efficient way.

Design: Each of the 5 elements of the organization's PPM was represented by 1 or more items on an author-developed instrument.

Lehigh Valley Hospital: engaging patients and families.

Background: Lehigh Valley Hospital (LVH), a 623-bed tertiary care referral center, is one of two hospitals of the Lehigh Valley Hospital and Health Network.

Patient And Family Involvement: Improving patient safety requires active engagement. Many units have collaborative rounds, which family members may join.

Use of a validated model to evaluate the impact of the work environment on outcomes at a magnet hospital.

Using a structural model, we evaluated the impact of leadership, staff stability, resources, workload, work environment, and staff expertise on nurse-sensitive patient outcomes to determine elements that can be modified.

Work flow analysis: eliminating non-value-added work.

Objective: To evaluate the impact of implemented work environment changes on nursing and support staff roles.

Background: In 1999, the authors identified key drivers of unnecessary work associated with the day-to-day delivery of patient care in their institution and implemented changes based on their results.

Methods: Both quantitative and qualitative methods were used.