July 15, 2014

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With the national and local demand for Acute Care Pediatric Nurse Practitioners, Texas Children’s and Texas Tech University have entered into a partnership agreement that supports faculty roles for APRNs, Priscila Reid MS, RN, FNP, CPNP-AC and Julie Kuzin, MSN RN CPNP-PC/AC. Students will enter the program this fall and will benefit from the expertise of these two APRNs that are dedicated to patients and families at Texas Children’s through advancing nursing education and training.

AC-PNPs practice in a variety of settings not only in the hospital’s intensive care and subspecialty units, they extend their practice to the community in caring for the technology dependent child and the chronically ill child with special needs. Historically, the hospital has relied on an abundance of residents to staff the 24/7 units. The shortage of residents and the mandate to reduce resident work hours from the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) has led many hospitals to rely on acute care nurse practitioner to provide quality patient care. With the shift in the model of using more acute care PNPs, the need for education and training has increased.

The partnership between Texas Tech University Health Science Center and Texas Children’s Hospital allows for Reid and Kuzin to have a paid faculty position with the university while still spending half of their time in the patient care setting at the hospital. We believe that this partnership will strengthen the recruitment of AC-PNPs at Texas Children’s.

“We are positioning Texas Children’s to step into the 21st Century to make a difference in patient outcomes by ‘advancing nursing practice through advanced practice nursing,” said Elizabeth “Charley” Elliott, director of advanced practice providers.
The courses will officially begin in the fall.

May 20, 2014

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St. Joseph’s Women’s Medical Center in downtown Houston recently cut the ribbon on its newly renovated neonatal intensive care unit. The renovations were a result of a partnership agreement with Texas Children’s Hospital which extends our neonatal care to the downtown hospital. The project cleared the way for state of the art support devices critical for the care of medically fragile infants. Just as important, it improved the environment for the patient and families in ways that have been shown to improve outcomes for critically ill infants.

“This partnership is critical to our overall regional strategy of ensuring the best care is available within reach for babies not just at Texas Children’s Hospital, but across the area,” said Dr. Stephen Welty, chief of neonatology. “We work closely with excellent nurseries in the community to promote the same quality and care standards followed in our level IV NICU.”

Texas Children’s provides St. Joseph’s with administrative and clinical support, giving patients access to the latest treatments available in neonatal and pediatric care, state-of-the-art equipment and pediatric sub specialists. That includes cardiology, neurology, infectious disease, ophthalmology and more.

St. Joseph’s is the seventh hospital in the Greater Houston community affiliated with our NICU. The others include Methodist West Houston Hospital, Methodist Willowbrook Hospital, Methodist San Jacinto Hospital, The Methodist Hospital, St. Luke’s The Woodlands Hospital and St. Luke’s Hospital at the Vintage. The partnerships also mean in the relatively rare circumstances when level IV care is necessary, the patients will be transferred to Texas Children’s Hospital.

“At Texas Children’s Hospital, our mission to build a healthy community of children begins at the very start of life,” said Cris Daskevich, senior vice president of Texas Children’s Pavilion for Women. “Our relationship with St. Joseph’s allows us to partner in providing exceptional neonatal care to the premature and critically-ill infants that need it most, so that babies can have the best possible outcomes.”