Neurology Service Line initiative receives grant
Saint Francis Medical Center
Grand Island, Neb. — The Catholic Health Initiatives (CHI) Learning Effectiveness Group has notified Saint Francis Medical Center that it will award grant funding to provide nursing education focused on caring for patients with neurology-related diagnoses. The grant is for $7,400 and will cover 100 percent of the total HealthStream courseware cost included in Saint Francis’ grant application.
“The CHI Learning Effectiveness team looks forward to helping you implement your initiative and support your efforts to evaluate the outcomes associated with the project,” said Kelly Tolson, client executive for HealthStream. “The effort Saint Francis undertook to submit for the funds was evident in the quality of your initiative description and presentation.”
Sherry Huffman, Saint Francis Educational Services director, said the learning initiative highlighted in the grant application involved a blended learning approach with the grant funds requested to support the Web-based portion of the plan. Huffman said the plan includes: Web-based training for more than 260 nurses, vendor training on new equipment, instructor-led sessions with nursing continuing education credit and skills verification using high-fidelity human simulation manikins for competency documentation.
Huffman said a multi-faceted plan will be used to evaluate the success of the project meeting its objectives. The evaluation plan includes: Role-specific self-evaluations sent to the target audience, test scores from the Web-based courses, pre- and post-tests based on American Association of Critical-Care Nurses (AACN) content in specialty and high-risk areas, evaluation of all instructor-led sessions using a Likert scale and measurement of the participants’ perceptions of increases in their skill and confidence levels using an attitude scale following the simulation scenarios.
Grant writers for the project were Gina Woods and Huffman. Huffman said she and Woods received “great support and input” from Bill Brennan, grant development coordinator; Francine Sparby, vice president of Patient Care Services; and numerous nursing leaders at Saint Francis.