Bill Klaproth (host): This is today in Nursing Leadership, a podcast from the American Organization for Nursing Leadership. I'm Bill Klaproth. With me today, we have Launette Woolforde. We also have Kathleen Casler, and we have Helena Willis as we talk about Destination Innovation from challenge to success across a large health system. Welcome.

Launette Woolforde: Thank you, Bill. It's great to be here.

Host: Absolutely.

Kathleen Casler: Thank you so much for having us.

Host: Yeah.

Helena Willis: Thank you, Bill. So excited to be here.

Host: Yeah. Well, I'm excited to have you here and talk about this topic. So Launette, let me start with you. Why is it so hard to foster a culture of innovation for nurse leaders?

Launette Woolforde: It's a great question, Bill. And even though nurses are natural innovators, sometimes it requires a bit of structure and process to bring out that inner innovator in nurses. So, we've certainly seen nurses innovate with technology contributions, other practice solutions. Many people may not even know that nurses were the brains behind some of the common practices that are in place today.

I can tell you, I laugh a bit because nurses innovate even when it comes to things like clearing gastric tubes, PEG tubes where nurses have been the ones to think about cranberry juice and ginger ale to regain free flow of those tubes and many other innovations that are much more sophisticated than that. But it's important to have infrastructure in the organization that supports and targets, nurses' voices, nurses' ideas, and enables the inner innovator to come out.

Host: Yeah. So, putting a structure in place that empowers nurses to cultivate these ideas. Would that be fair to say?

Launette Woolforde: Yes. Absolutely.

Host: Yeah. So, let's talk about how you did that then. What is the structure? You talked about structure and process, Launette. What did you put in place? How did you start this? Did you do a committee or a survey? How did you put this together?

Launette Woolforde: Yeah. Well, we took a multi-pronged approach. Every four years, the nurse executive council at Northwell Health comes together to establish the strategic plan for nursing. And in 2023, we established a pillar of our strategic plan dedicated to innovation. And as a result, the council rallied around innovation and the innovation pillar leaders and team decided to form a nursing Innovation Council system-wide. And this council was established for the purpose of creating a form and a platform for nurses at all levels of practice to submit ideas, to receive feedback and advice from subject matter experts in their area of practice and perhaps, most importantly, to receive support in the development of the idea. So, the Innovation Council was one of the structures that we put in place to foster innovation among nurses

Kathleen Casler: And to build upon that, we knew that we also were going to need to get everyone really excited about this across the system. So, we leveraged another existing structure that was in place, which was our nursing leadership retreat. So, each year, our chief nurse executive for the health system invites nurse leaders from across the system, including aspiring nurse leaders, might be current clinical nurses to a nursing leadership retreat, which is a place for us to start to generate ideas about how to implement our strategic plan for the coming year.

And the focus of our nursing leadership retreat following creation of the Innovation Council was innovation. We called it Destination Innovation. And what we did a little bit differently for that retreat was to create work groups from across the system. And so, we brought together nurses from a variety of roles and brought together people from across different sites across the system and challenged each of them to come up with an innovative idea in an area of practice that they were passionate about impacting, with the concept of them ultimately delivering these innovative ideas, Shark Tank style. So, each of these groups of nurses was tasked with coming up with a really engaging pitch. And then, at our leadership retreat event, they had the opportunity to pitch to a multidisciplinary panel of sharks that were from inside healthcare and also outside healthcare in areas of technology and team engagement and patient experience experts, to try to see what ideas we could come up with.

Host: I love it. So, you really are fostering a culture of innovation. You're asking for ideas, you want ideas, you want people to have a seat at the table. Would that be right? Yeah?

Kathleen Casler: Yes.

Launette Woolforde: Yes.

Host: Wow, this is really cool. I love it. So, what have you seen? What kind of results have you seen? Can you tell us what's been happening since you've instituted these things?

Helena Willis: Well, since the inception of the Innovation Council, we've had 59 nurse-led innovations that went through the council through a whole bunch of different domains. Specifically, I can talk about workflow process and alternate care methods. For the workflow process, we had virtual nursing, but we really took it to another level and brought the virtual nursing, got the ideas from the nurses to get their ideas of how virtual nursing can make their workflow better. And we had significant success in patient experience in nurse engagement with the virtual nursing. And it's being disseminated now across the whole health system. And as well as the alternate care model, looking at how can we do things differently with what we have and combining the RN-LPN dyad. We had introduced it as pilot, which we've been able to disseminate throughout the whole health system with significant improvement in outcomes and also some financial decrease.

Host: Well, yeah, anytime you talk about improved ROI, people want to listen and better outcomes for patients as well. So, all of your efforts have certainly done wonders for those. Wow, this is really interesting. I love how you put this whole process together. Before we wrap up, I'd love to just go around the table and get final thoughts from each of you. So, Launette, let me start with you. Final thoughts or key takeaways from the programs you've put in place.

Launette Woolforde: Well, I think one lesson learned is that it's important for us as nurses to be fluent in the language of the audience that we are speaking to. So when we put together this Innovation Council and worked through it, put forth some of the models that Helena just talked about. We paid attention to what the nurses wanted to gain out of this experience. It's exciting to be an innovator, but we knew that they wanted opportunities to have a relief of task burdens. They wanted to spend more time with patients. They wanted to come up with ideas and enable ideas that allowed them to get closer to the things that brought them into nursing in the first place. So, it's just important that, yes, we're focused on quality outcomes. Yes, we're focused on financial performance. But it's most important to remain rooted in focusing on nurses and nursing practice and doing things that enable nurses to be fulfilled in their roles.

Host: Yeah, this gets them closer to why they became a nurse in the first place. Caring for individuals.

Launette Woolforde: That's right. Yeah.

Host: That's a great thought. Thank you, Launette. Kathleen, how about you? Key takeaways or final thoughts?

Kathleen Casler: Yeah, it's interesting. Similar theme, but maybe from a slightly different angle. And I think that an important key takeaway is to listen to your frontline nurses. As Launette queued up, nurses are natural in innovators. They're innovating every day. And it's very easy as a nurse leader to get in the habit of when a suggestion comes forward, being concerned about perhaps the initial way you think about it might require financial investment or, that's not the way that we've done things historically, but every one of those interactions with a clinical nurse who's working closest to your patients every day is an opportunity to hear them and to support their natural, innovative spirit.

We do this through shared governance structures, perhaps a more formal way across healthcare. But I think even those one-on-one moments shouldn't be left to pass you by without listening to what your frontline managers have to say. Understanding the challenges that they're encountering every day, and then empowering them to tap into that creative spirit and come up with solutions that might just be the next big thing that makes a big difference.

Host: It might just be the next big thing. I love how you said that. Yeah. So thank you, Kathleen. I really appreciate that. Helena, how about you? Final thoughts or key takeaways?

Helena Willis: I think the biggest key takeaway is making innovation part of your strategic plan. But also, to remember to making it part of your orientation plan to inspire those nurses when they're on orientation to think innovatively and not to be afraid to bring it forward.

Host: Yeah. So, start early at orientation, let them know that, yes, we want to hear from you. If you have an idea, if you're finding friction or issues and you think you may have a solution, let us know or come to us with a problem and we'll have the, as you call it, the Nursing Innovation Council. We'll put our minds behind this and try to come up with a solution. So, really good. Well, thank you all for coming by today. This has really been wonderful talking to all of you. Thank you again.

Launette Woolforde: Thank you. It's been a pleasure.

Helena Willis: Thank you.

Kathleen Casler: Thank you for having us.

Host: Yeah, absolutely. And once again, I want to thank Helena Willis, kathleen Casler, and Launette Woolforde. And for more information, please visit aonl.org. And if you found this podcast helpful, please share it on your social channels and check out the full podcast library for topics of interest to you. This is today in Nursing leadership. Thanks for listening.