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A Celebration of Nursing at Cottage Health System
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It is my pleasure to introduce you to the third edition of Nursing Excellence for 2009, during National Nurses Week. We are building a tradition of leaving our nursing legacy in print each year. Reflecting on our Magnet Journey, we can be especially proud of these many accomplishments as they raise the bar for nursing excellence at Cottage.
Last year was an amazing one. The economy plagued the nation as unemployment rose to an all-time high. Fortunately for Cottage Health System, so did our census. This allowed us to offer jobs to many nurses who could not find work or to travelers who had no job to go to. We had a record number of RN hires at 170 for the year, with 40 being traveler conversions. We had five New Grad classes and unfortunately had over 300 applicants for each New Grad class. Additionally, we furthered our partnership with California State University Channel Islands (CSUCI). We are well on our way to offering a local BSN program in our community in the near future. You may ask why we would develop this program in addition to our current partnership with SBCC, with the number of nurses trying to find jobs. The answer is that we know as our “Nursing Boomers” start to retire, the workforce will shrink at CHS dramatically and along with it, great knowledge and experience. It is our responsibility to prepare our future workforce now.
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(note: 3MB file)
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It is time to add a BSN option for local education. The wait lists for both schools remain high. California remains at the bottom of the list for RNs per capita in the nation, so this is the responsible thing to do and we at CHS are fortunate to be able to help support this.
There is exciting work happening at all the CHS campuses as it relates to all of our new hospitals under construction. New monitors and equipment were chosen in 2009 and we look forward to state-of-the-art facilities at each campus when they open. Nursing took its first step toward the final phases of the EMR (Electronic Medical Record–ClinDoc) with the rollout of WOWs (Workstations On Wheels). This enabled nurses to bring their medication drawers and charting to the bedside. Build-and-design teams started working on software and will be completing the final phases in 2010. Our health system also endured 12 surveys by regulatory agencies, all of which we passed. We won numerous awards for both system efforts and individual nurses, all highlighted in this edition. Additionally, we brought quality indicators to an all-new high as a system, this as transparency becomes the report card to the public when shopping for quality health care.
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Please join me in the celebration of our wonderful profession during Nurse’s Week.
Special thanks to our Nurse Excellence Publishing Team!
Herb Geary, RN
Vice President, Patient Care Services / Chief Nursing Officer
Cottage Health System
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