In 2011 when the Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality began convening clinical communities to improve and standardize patient care across Johns Hopkins Medicine, the groups were led by physicians. Now the health system has gained its first nursing clinical community: a team of 34 nurses led by Maria Koszalka, vice president of patient care services at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center; and Joanne Miller, vice president of patient care services and chief nursing officer at Sibley Memorial Hospital.

The Nursing Quality Clinical Community is one of 21 clinical communities focused on quality-improvement projects across the system in areas such as cardiac surgery, diabetes and medication management. By building on the shared wisdom of its members, it aims to prevent harm, improve patient outcomes and experience, and reduce waste and cost.

The group is developing its organizational structure and gathering data from across all six hospitals. “We want to introduce performance-improvement plans for clinical outcomes that nursing staff has the unique ability to improve,” Koszalka says. Examples of such efforts include patient falls, pressure ulcers, patient satisfaction and pain management.

“One of our goals is to learn and share evidence-based practices and disseminate these across all of our entities,” Miller says.

The group, which meets once a month, includes representatives from nursing, quality, patient safety and operations.