June 10th UPC meeting minutes

Present: Jackie, Jen, Laura, Melissa, Danielle, Karen, Jon, Carol, Pru Selden

Pru Selden from Best Care Best Experience attended the meeting and discussed ways that we could improve the waiting experience in triage. In surveys completed by patients they indicated that creating a “homier” atmosphere in the triage waiting area would make them more comfortable. Some ideas that were mentioned were to create an area for children to play, Jon Henkel was present and stated that this idea was visited in the past and that there were problems with infection control.  Pru mentioned having a rack with informational brochures (domestic violence, drug use, community resources, Etc.) might provide patients with valuable information and items to read. The Wishing Well fund is a hospital resource that can be used for patients with low income to help cover the cost of medication and other hospital costs.  It is unclear how this program can be used in the ER since it is social work driven, we will be looking in to this to see how it could be implemented appropriately in the ED.

Karen Poor gave an update from the divisional council that she is on. In the past we discussed briefly the possibility of transporting stable telemetry patients to the floor unmonitored. Currently this concept needs to go through the Patient Care Committee and will hopefully be implemented soon.

The Criteria that these patients will need to meet to be transported off monitor are as follows:

              They must have no acute EKG changes

              Their Troponin must be normal

              They must have no active cardiac chest pain

              No syncopal episode related to a cardiac arrthymia

              No new cardiac arrthymias

If it is deemed appropriate by a physician, at this time an order may be written to transport the patient off monitor. This order needs to be in the patient’s chart and the floor must be notified.

This new transport policy has not been official approved so at this time we must continue to transport patients like we normally do unless there is a specific MD order in the patients chart to do otherwise.

Another important topic that Karen brought to our attention from this committee is that we need to be sure we are documenting skin break down on out patients.  Medicare will not pay for treatment of skin break down acquired during a hospital stay or any nosocomial infection. This cost never reaches the patient it is absorbed by the hospital, but we need to document skin break that patients arrive with.

The changes to Epic have FINALLY arrived. So far things seem to be going OK. J

Please contact the individuals in your group to let them know that you are their UPC representative and that we are looking for feedback about how things are going with the changes.

The next meeting will be July 8th.  We are looking at have a picnic off campus; we have all worked so hard and deserve to have a little fun.  We discussed possibly going to Rice Park down town.  Let me know if anyone has any further thoughts on this this.

Thanks

Jackie

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