dear miss nightingale,
I am working on a hospital committee that is tasked with decreasing our 30 day readmission rate for heart failure patients. The group has developed a "clinical pathway" for the heart failure patient. It is a multidisciplinary document that includes all the care that we (MD, RN, nutrition, PT/OT, etc.) provide for a patient with the diagnosis of heart failure.
I am a critical care nurse with 15 years of nursing experience. This last year I was part of an interdisciplinary team that developed the care plan content that will be used in our future EMR. Currently, I am working as a subject matter expert for the EMR implementation team.
This is my problem: I have experienced a paradigm shift in my thinking about care planning and documentation in an EMR environment and I don't know how to share this epiphany with others. I don't have all the words I need and I don't have the positional authority to be heard if I did.
NOTE: When words are found to describe this epiphany I will insert them here.
I feel as though I have trekked through a long dark maze of unexpected twists and turns and murky waters, with weeds tangling my feet and cobwebs sticking in my hair and I've left my peers at the other side. The injuries I sustained on this journey have healed so no one can tell what I went through.
Now I can see the path as clear as day inside my head. I want to tell them how to get through the maze but why would they listen to me? Who am I to tell them? And if they would listen, I don't know that I would have the right words. What if I lose most of them along the way? It is very lonely on this side.
Sincerely,
One a-Maze-ing Nurse
