August 15, 2017

Dr. Milton Finegold (left), chief emeritus, Department of Texas Children’s Pathology and Mary Jo Andre (far right), chief nursing officer, congratulates Finegold Award recipients Christopher Willoughby, (from left), son of Robbye Willoughby, West Campus Emergency Center; Amelia Boettiger, daughter of Michele Boettiger, patient care manager, Neonatal Intensive Care Unit; Alexie-Joy De La Cruz, daughter of Arlene De La Cruz, education coordinator, Diagnostic Imaging; and Cayla Morris, daughter of Sondra Morris, assistant clinical director, West Campus.

Finegold established the scholarship in 1980 in memory of his wife, Joan, a nurse, to help the children of Texas Children’s registered nurses fulfill their educational goals. The applicant (registered nurse) must be an employee of Texas Children’s for a minimum of two years on or before May 1 of the year of application. Since the first scholarship was awarded in 1985, more than 90 children have benefited from the Joan M. Finegold Scholarship.

Dr. Rebecca Schultz, a member of Texas Children’s Epilepsy team in Pediatric Neurology was recently named the 2017 recipient of the Association of Child Neurology Nurses (ACNN) Excellence in Child Neurology Practitioner Award.

This prestigious award recognizes and honors the nurse practitioner or physician’s assistant who, as a member of the ACNN, has rendered distinguished service within the profession of child neurology nursing.

Schultz is one who demonstrates, through strength of character and competence, a commitment to the care of children with neurological disorders and their families. She is acknowledged by her peers as one who exhibits qualities of compassion, resourcefulness, leadership, knowledge, communication and inspiration.

August 8, 2017

Nurses at Texas Children’s are natural innovators. They ask questions, ponder processes and think outside the box to develop solutions that improve care and outcomes for patients. For nurses Michael Pickett, Nicholas Keith and Anthony Bentley, a shared passion for patient-centered innovation ultimately brought them together.

“After working on projects of our own, we talked and realized we all faced the same kinds of challenges and frustrations,” said Keith, a float pool nurse at Texas Children’s. “Knowing how grueling the process can be to implement a new idea, we set out to develop a council that would support frontline staff using a bottom-up approach to give life to ideas from end users.”

The idea to create a venue that would bring end user needs, ideas and solutions to clinical practice provided the visionary roadmap they needed to launch Texas Children’s first-ever Innovative Solutions Nursing Council that would be run entirely by staff nurses.

“While none of us had prior shared governance experience, we approached our nursing leaders, Emily Weber and Charley Elliott, who supported our idea,” said Pickett, a nurse practitioner in the Anesthesia section at Texas Children’s. “We presented our strategic plan at several leadership meetings. Our leaders supported us and assigned a senior project manager who helped us with the council start-up process.”

After months of planning, the council – comprising 12 staff nurses and an advisory team – held its first operational meeting in May 2016. The broad array of specialty areas represented on the council included physical therapy, supply chain, biomedical engineering, information services, business development, nursing quality and nursing research.

Developing solutions to support new ideas

Once a month for an hour and a half, the council and support staff meet to brainstorm new ideas, deliver strategic guidance, and create and implement action plans for nurse-led projects that address particular needs or concerns. This unique style of collaboration sets the stage for significant results.

The council receives ideas or identified needs from various sources. For example, a staff member may have a solution but not know how to get support; or a leadership initiative or staff member may identify a need, but have no clear solution for how to address the challenge. Once an idea is introduced, the process of developing a solution begins with council members conducting a thorough needs and solutions analysis.

“Combining research data, surveys and end-user feedback, we simulate and prototype the solution to develop and vet the proof of concept before presenting collaborative recommendations to leadership for their support,” Pickett said. “We are continuously evaluating and making adjustments throughout this process to ensure that the final design of the product will meet the specific needs of the end user.”

Collaboration leads to innovative solutions

Since the council was formed, the team has already reached innovative milestones that would not have been possible without support from collaborative partners and executive leaders including departmental colleagues, nursing leadership and the council leadership sponsors.

Working with Pryor Products, a leading manufacturer of IV poles and accessories, the council helped staff co-design a prototype IV pole to which an oxygen canister and chest tubes could be more easily attached. The council also worked with GCX, a worldwide leader in medical instrument mounting, to develop a more secure method for mounting a monitor on the IV pole.

Previously in the cardiovascular intensive care unit, the attachment of these medical items created a patient safety concern. Oxygen tanks were hung too loosely, allowing them to swing. Monitors and chest tubes were tied to the poles with rope and secured with tape and trach ties. Heart line transducers were hung at inappropriate levels and would not fit on the poles at patient level.

“Our innovations provide a safe and secure holder for oxygen tanks and chest tubes,” Keith said. “We now have a mount on the IV pole that keeps our monitors visible and holds them securely in place and a pole extension for our transducers that will remain at the appropriate level of the patient.”

Another example was the production of a 360-degree virtual reality video that simulated, inside a pre-construction mock-up space, proposed neurosurgical and MRI facilities for Texas Children’s Legacy Tower. The video proved to be a valuable tool that allowed the team and leaders involved in the design process to re-evaluate the space in real time.

“This video has benefited staff and leaders because it provides a 360-degree view of the room,” Keith said. “The viewer can select which point of view to experience by simply restarting the video and changing their focus.

The council has many more projects in the pipeline, including developing solutions to reduce neonatal vibration in isolettes and resolving skin care challenges in patient care units.

“Our council is a huge resource for Texas Children’s,” said Bentley, a nurse with Texas Children’s Kangaroo Crew. “Employees and staff now have a place where their ideas can take root, be nurtured, and one day produce measurable outcomes for patients and their families. We are grateful to our leaders for their instrumental and continued support that led to the success of this project.”

Texas Children’s is a large and growing health system with many specialties and sub-specialties. We take care of the sickest of the sick and provide routine pediatric care to otherwise healthy children. Many times that care involves not one medical expert but a team of medical experts, including pediatric anesthesiologist.

“The core role of the Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine is to provide surgical anesthesia, but we are not just in the operating room,” Anesthesiologist-In-Chief Dr. Dean B. Andropoulos said. “We provide care in radiology, our Pain Medicine Clinic, in the Intensive Care Units, and at all three Texas Children’s Hospital campuses. We also are in the laboratory doing cutting edge research, writing some of the top textbooks in our field, and educating and training the next generation of pediatric anesthesiologists.”

During a recent Department of Surgery Grand Rounds, Andropoulos discussed the strategic goals of his growing department and how it touches almost every aspect of patient care.

The department’s 78 pediatric anesthesiologists represent the largest group of pediatric anesthesiologists in the country. All are board certified or are in the process of becoming board certified and all provide anesthetic care in almost 60 locations on a daily basis.

Across these locations, Texas Children’s anesthesiologists were involved in 43,456 cases last year, a 36 percent increase from the number of cases anesthesiologists participated in seven years ago. The majority of the cases worked last year, 68 percent, occurred in the operating room. The remaining 32 percent of cases happened outside the OR in various inpatient and outpatient settings.

“The fact that we do more than 40,000 anesthetics in a year lends to the level of expertise of our group,” said Medical Director of Perioperative Services Dr. Chris Glover. “I don’t know of another place where you can take your child to get the amount of expertise that exists here.”

This level of expertise was recently exemplified by the expansion of the Pre-Anesthesia Screening Service (PASS) Clinic to Texas Children’s Hospital West Campus and Texas Children’s Hospital The Woodlands. These clinics are involved in pre-anesthetic consultation and planning for patients with complex medical problems or who are undergoing complicated surgical procedures.

Patients are evaluated by anesthesiology nurse practitioners and anesthesiologists, and an anesthetic plan is developed that is communicated to parents, surgeons and procedural physicians. This planning leads to improved patient and family education, better outcomes and fewer delays and cancellations of surgery. This service emphasizes the increasing role of pediatric anesthesiologists as perioperative physicians whose expertise benefits patients all across the Texas Children’s system.

Being part of an academic center, Baylor College of Medicine, allows the Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine to continue to strengthen and grow its already solid knowledge base, Andropoulos said.

In addition to providing top notch clinical care, the department’s clinical staff is involved in numerous clinical and basic science research protocols, many of which are funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Just last year, the department’s faculty published over 40 articles peer reviewed journals. They also served as editor and/or author of eight textbooks, including Anesthesia for Congenital Heart Disease, 3rd Edition. The textbook is the leading reference source for the field.

The department has taken a lead in educating anesthesiologists at Texas Children’s and beyond about the Federal Drug Administration’s recent warning that repeated or lengthy use of general anesthetic and sedation drugs during surgeries or procedures in children younger than 3 or in pregnant women during their third trimester may affect the development of children’s brains.

“Parents know we are up-to-date on the very latest information,” Andropoulos said. They also know we all are aware that taking care of their child is a privilege, a real responsibility that we take extremely seriously.”

Members of the Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine are always striving to do better and have set out three primary strategic goals for the next few years. These goals are:

  • To enhance patient experience by design and enhanced method of measuring anesthesiology patients satisfaction data.
  • Expand pain services by creating a strong business model for the service line and engaging and strengthening collaborative partnerships with clinical specialties to increase access to care for pain patients.
  • Increase research grant funding and resources by growing the volume of peer reviewed journal publications and grant proposals in the department and acquiring more funding from major grant proposals.

“We will continue to strengthen and grow our department,” Andropoulos said. “We want to remain one of the top pediatric anesthesiology programs in the country.”

Department leadership and contact information
  • Anesthesiologist-In-Chief, Dr. Dean B. Andropoulos
  • Associate Anesthesiologist-In-Chief Academic Affairs, Dr. Blaine Easley
  • Associate Anesthesiologist-In-Chief Clinical Affairs, Dr. Emad Mossad
  • Medical Director of Perioperative Services, Dr. Chris Glover

For more information about Texas Children’s Hospital Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine, visit the department’s website at http://www.texaschildrens.org/departments/anesthesiology or call ext. 4-5800.

Megnon Stewart, MSN, RN, education specialist for Nursing Professional Development at Texas Children’s, was recently named the 2017 Star Search winner at the Association for Nursing Professional Development (ANPD) national conference.

Each year, ANPD holds a Star Search competition at the annual convention to encourage aspiring speakers to compete for an opportunity to present a concurrent session at the next annual convention.

Each participant had 10 minutes to give a brief presentation that was judged by members of the ANPD Convention Content Planning Committee (CPC) and the audience. The CPC score constitutes 75 percent of the total score and the audience score constitutes 25 percent of the total. The participant who receives the highest score is invited to present a 60-minute concurrent session at the 2018 Annual Convention in Orlando, FL, and receives one complimentary convention registration.

Congratulations to Megnon for representing Texas Children’s with this prestigious award.

August 1, 2017

When Texas Children’s Hospital opened its doors in 1954, we had 224,000 square feet of space located in the middle of the Texas Medical Center. Today, our medical complex stretches across the greater Houston area and consists of more than 8 million square feet of multi-floor buildings, offices and parking garages.

As Texas Children’s continues to expand its services and facilities, navigating the hallways and buildings of a large hospital campus can be a bit challenging for patients and their families, including our faculty, employees and staff.

“We want to make our patient experience as seamless and compassionate as possible,” said Vice President Matt Girotto, who is leading the wayfinding initiative. “Eliminating some of our wayfinding hurdles to make it easier for patients and their families to get to where they need to go will enhance their experience immensely, allowing them to focus on what is most important – their medical care.”

With the recent opening of Texas Children’s Hospital in The Woodlands, the renaming of the Clinical Care Tower in honor of our longtime President and CEO Mark A. Wallace, and the remarkable progress being made on the Legacy Tower, new enhancements are being implemented to improve wayfinding across the system.

Wallace Tower transition

The transition process of renaming the Clinical Care Tower to the Mark A. Wallace Tower will take several months to complete and will be conducted in two phases.

  • Phase I: Signs, email signatures, patient handouts/communications, patient letters, scripts for patient calls can be edited now to include “Wallace Tower (formerly Clinical Care Tower)” until the transition phase is completed.
  • Phase II: Information Services (IS) will reprogram all Epic and IS systems to “MW” and “Wallace Tower.” This process will take six months. Once completed, the updates will go live at once across the system.
  • When Phase II is completed approximately by the end of this year, all transition references of “Wallace Tower (formerly Clinical Care Tower)” will need to be adjusted to reflect the final name of “Wallace Tower.”
  • For now, printed materials that list “Clinical Care Center” or “Clinical Care Tower” can continue to be used. They do not need to be updated until current inventory is depleted or the transition is complete, whichever comes first.
Campus maps

Updated maps of Texas Children’s Medical Center Campus, Texas Children’s Hospital West Campus and Texas Children’s Hospital The Woodlands are now available for download and print. Click here to download the maps.

Texas Medical Center Campus Level 3 Bridge map

A new map detailing destinations and amenities on the Level 3 bridge connecting Wallace Tower, Legacy Tower, Pavilion for Women and West Tower is now available for print, download or web linking.

Wayfinding web app

It is now easier than ever to access wayfinding information on the go. Follow these steps to create a bookmark on the home screen of your phone that links directly to wayfinding information. The app is available for Android and iPhones, and will be updated with West Campus and The Woodlands information in the near future.

Information stations

Texas Children’s will eventually have 22 digital building directories across all campuses once implemented at Legacy Tower and West Campus. All information station monitors are touch-screen activated and feature a corresponding campus map, step-by-step directions to various locations. The information stations are a self-service resource to provide real-time information to visitors.

In addition to these updated wayfinding resources, remember the best wayfinding aid is the Texas Children’s employee who asks a patient, family or visitor how they can help. If you have any map printing needs or comments about wayfinding at Texas Children’s, contact wayfinding@texaschildrens.org.

Texas Children’s Heart Center has partnered with Project ADAM® to help prevent the deaths of children and adolescents due to sudden cardiac arrest.

Started in Wisconsin in 1999 by a family whose son died from the condition, Project ADAM® helps schools nationwide implement programs to make automated external defibrillators (AEDs) readily available by preparing schools for a cardiac emergency through emergency response plans, staff CPR and AED training, student CPR education and sudden cardiac arrest awareness education.

Melody Stephens brought the program to Houston and reached out to Texas Children’s for help after her 18-year-old son, Cody, fell asleep in a recliner at home and never woke up. Doctors determined the teenager, who had recently been awarded an athletic scholarship to play college football, died from sudden cardiac arrest.

“My primary goal is to help schools to be prepared to respond appropriately to a cardiac emergency so that the victim has the best chance of survival,” Stephens said. “Texas Children’s has embraced the concept and has done everything they can to make schools safer for children with heart conditions.”

Two area schools – Bonnie Holland Elementary in the Katy Independent School District and Crosby Kindergarten in the Crosby Independent School District – have been named Heart Safe Schools through Texas Children’s Hospital’s partnership with Project ADAM®. Five more campuses are awaiting the receipt of the designation and four other schools are in the process of becoming Heart Safe.

In order to become a Heart Safe School, teachers learn about the risks of sudden cardiac arrest as well as CPR training. Texas Children’s physicians and Heart Center team members helped provide the school with the training.

“Texas Children’s Hospital believes prevention is just as important as treatment,” said Texas Children’s Pediatric Cardiologist Dr. Santiago Valdes, who serves as medical director of the local Project ADAM® initiative. “We are more than happy to lend our expertise to these schools while they check items off of the required checklist needed to become a Heart Safe School.”

For more information about Project ADAM® click here. To read a Texas Children’s blog post by Stephens about her and her son’s experience with sudden cardiac arrest, click here.