Process Excellence

Hey Mom,


       Just thought I would write you for the day before I bury myself in my pathophysiology book for a few hours and head off to bed. I have fallen behind a bit with the reading for my class. It’s not that the class is too much for me, more so that the combination of work, class, children, and family take quite a bit of time collectively. I’m going to work on that though. I have thought a lot about what should happen if for some reason I don’t finish this program and move to the next level in my current career. I have ideas of what I may do if that turns out to be the case.

       Aside from feeling like a failure for a period of time and having to make up an excuse for not continuing my classes to every person that knows I’m working on my master’s degree I would have to explain to myself why I failed to reach my goal. Although I would feel a bit lost I do have other things I would like to pursue, both within the nursing career as well as outside. Writing would be a large portion of my external endeavors.

       For the past three days I participated in a project at work to develop a better system for distributing and tracking IV pumps to prevent the nursing staff from having to search every patient room and calling other units to find a pump. We sat in a small room most of the time and discussed the process we go through to find a pump and how much time is lost at the bedside just looking for the equipment our patients need.

       Other time was spent physically inventorying every pump we could find in the entire hospital and asking each unit how many pumps they need to run proficiently. At the conclusion of the three day event we presented our findings and plans for a pilot program to all of the unit managers and system directors who were available. From what I’ve heard since it was a successful presentation and further steps will be taken to make the three unit pilot program happen.

       It was monotonous at times but I enjoyed the overall process we went through to make changes. I’ll probably ask to be a part of another project like this one. They come around every month or month-and-a-half. I’m a nerd, I know. I like to interpret data and put it all together in spread sheets and graphs. I’m not sure where I inherited that from or if I developed that on my own.

       That’s enough procrastinating for now. I REALLY need to get to reading all about medical type stuff. Talk to you again later on.