While the medical-surgical unit was undergoing a physical transformation to be ready for an influx of COVID-19 patients, a related and just as important project kicked off—efforts to make the hospital’s nursing staff pandemic-ready as well.

In less than three weeks’ time, nurse leaders trained approximately 200 nurses to potentially redeploy for COVID-19 care and built an education and training system to fill possible knowledge gaps.

Allison Steinberg, director of excellence in nursing practice and education, says the process started with a full-spectrum inventory of all staff nurses to gauge their backgrounds, years of experience, training and interest to potentially redeploy for COVID-19 care. To gauge readiness gaps, the team also created a skills worksheet with different tiers of training beginning with common medical-surgical skills needed to care for patients with COVID-19. The worksheet increased in complexity to include telemetry-reading and similar advanced monitoring, and culminated in a checklist of critical care tasks.

Once skills gaps were identified, the hospital created an online training module to provide background knowledge on each topic area. Then, nurse educators from across the hospital stepped up, including those in endoscopy and perioperative services, to provide hands-on training that reinforced the new information. Training included basics such as infection control and personal protective equipment procedures, and specific details such as ventilator settings for nurses with critical care backgrounds.

Throughout it all, communication and a clear organizational structure were key to ensuring that everyone who cared for patients with COVID-19 had the supplies, knowledge and skills they needed to provide the best care for these patients and stay safe while doing it.

When the first patients came in, the nurses, and the hospital, stood ready.