At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Health Services had to quickly pivot to meet the sudden surge of patients needing care across Health Services hospitals. This required the nursing leadership team to develop a process to manage the movement of staff to deliver those much-needed services. At first, the process was manual in nature and required an overwhelming amount of time and energy to maintain. Health Services leadership realized this was an opportunity to look for other ways to track and deploy staff. Health Services was able to partner with the Internal Services Department (ISD) to develop a deployment dashboard to track staff movement in direct response to the pandemic. In addition, a Registered Nurse (RN) Specialty Skills Survey was developed in partnership with SEIU Local 721 and electronically disseminated to all RNs to gather nursing specialty skills, years of experience, core competencies, as well as preferred alternate hospital work location(s).
Creation of the survey and corresponding dashboard proved very valuable during the winter surge. Since its inception, over 1,400 staff deployments (internal and external) were tracked as part of the project. Despite the complexity of varying shifts/schedules and work locations, management of staff in the system allowed for real-time modifications to be made in order to meet everchanging patient care demands. The extensive database offered nursing leadership the ability to instantly view the array of specialty skills available and align them with the hospital, unit, or patients needing those specific types of care most. The dashboard also enabled daily and ad-hoc reports to be furnished quickly and accurately to assist leadership in making informed decisions.
During a difficult time of challenges and uncertainty, the creation of this technology-driven solution played a crucial role in supporting Health Services’ mission to deliver the highest quality of care to all Los Angeles County patients.
The Project Team is comprised of Susan Currin, Health Services Chief Nursing Officer and Nursing Leadership members Debra Duran, Michelle Sterling, and Anna Veerathappa; HR Team: Elizabeth Jacobi, Administrative Deputy, Sharon Robinson, Debbie Garcia, and La Tonya Calloway; Health Services-IT Team: Jesse Sungruengyos and Alvin Harris; as well as the ISD-IT Team: Ivan Pacheco, Cuong Luong, Jodie Tan, Mailoan Le, and Tony Thi.
We would also like to take this opportunity to thank all the RNs and deployed staff for their unwavering commitment to providing exceptional care when the Los Angeles County residents needed it most.
