Lorena Pena is an Advanced Nurse Practitioner at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, and a graduate of the Horizon Fellowship (now the CW Innovation Fellowship). In this video, Lorena shares how the Fellowship helped her kickstart a project aimed at improving how nurses spot and respond to early signs of patient deterioration on the wards.
Watch the video or read the transcript below.
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Hear from Lorena how the Fellowship helped her turn an idea into an award-winning project that has measurably improved patient care in our hospitals.
Lorena's story: transcript
I was inspired to apply for the Horizon Fellowship, now known as the CW Innovation Fellowship, because of the opportunity for me to develop my skills and knowledge in bringing this project to be more successful.
Project overview
The project that I initiated is titled Recognition and Escalation of Deteriorating Patients.
It is a quality improvement project. We help nurses improve their monitoring practices in finding patients who are showing signs of deterioration. Recognising the deterioration early, patients would be able to receive the treatment that they need and help them to recover.
What we did with the clinical practice performance of the nurses – we introduced our observation rounds where we standardised the monitoring of the patients. We have a dashboard that we developed and it’s a very real-time dashboard that picks up all these patients deteriorating, showing a high new scores.
Being a Horizon Fellow, it did make a lot of difference in the implementation of the project in the sense that all this training and all these workshops I attended, it helped me acquire or equip me with good leadership kind of skills.
A culture of collaboration and support
Being a Horizon Fellow is like – I managed to connect with the same-minded kind of people and professionals and stakeholders where we all share our ideas, and you don’t feel alone.
The Horizon Fellowship team was all there with you all throughout to support you.
The most noticeable differences that we observed after we implemented this project in the wards – the culture, the patient safety culture, was now well-embedded. You can see the clear improvement in the practice of the nurses. Everyone now is aware that this is what they need to do – in monitoring the patients, which improves the recognition of deterioration.
We have this monthly reporting of data on how we are performing as a Trust in the recognition and responding to the deteriorating patients, so we are able to see the uptrending performance since we started the project.
Recognition and awards
We received so many awards nationally and recognition. We won as a Patient Safety Team of the Year in the HSJ Patient Safety Awards. I attended a national conference of the critical care outreach and I was awarded first place for the oral presentation of this project.
Without the Fellowship, probably it would be harder for me to get this outcome.
To my future Fellows
I would encourage clinicians to apply for the CW Innovation Fellowship.
It is a means to step back from your day-to-day roles as a clinician and a way to reflect on how you’re going to be able to drive change. If you identify a problem, don’t ignore it because you might be the only person seeing it.
Through its CW Innovation Fellowship programme, CW+ is helping Trust staff to lead change and improve patient care.
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