During you career as a Registered Nurse, have you been open to participating on any project teams or other administrative projects?

"Two years ago, when the company I was working for was undergoing their EHR upgrade, my manager put me in charge of ensuring that all clinicians, nurses, and staff on my unit were trained on the upgraded product. Since there were three separate required training classes, each offered at multiple times and dates. It wasn't easy to keep up with who had attended which session. To make it easy for me to track who attended the training sessions, I created a spreadsheet in Excel with validations and dropdown boxes, so I could easily visualize who had completed each training and who had not. I posted this spreadsheet on my unit's share drive so each employee could update it accordingly, and weekly, I would verify the information with the training office's records."

Yes, I have been involved in projects at my previous job. We had an opportunity to take part in what is called Staff nurse I or staff nurse II. In these programs, you present an idea that would improve the nursing staff. The object is to create a new policy or nurse education class. One of the projects I had the opportunity to work on was a nurse-driven algorithm that would help nurses know what to do when a baby would not breastfeed or was not breastfeeding well. A colleague and I noticed that there were instances where the nurses did not know what to do. So we worked with the pediatricians to develop an algorithm the nurses could follow to assist them in their decision-making process.