In 2024, Kirsten Davidson, a Clinical Nurse Consultant at The Royal Children’s Hospital (RCH) was awarded the Dame Elisabeth Murdoch Nursing Development Scholarship. Kirsten’s project, named Time to Care, aims to ensure the best possible nurse to patient allocation, whilst also enhancing holistic patient and family-centred care – something the RCH is well known for.
This scholarship, made possible with the support from the RCH Auxiliaries and GrapeCo Australia, allowed Kirsten to combine her passion for nursing informatics and excellent patient care to improve the management of nursing workloads across wards. It has been several months since Kirsten first received this scholarship and we recently caught up with her to find out how her project is progressing.
Q: Can you please describe what your project, Time to Care, is and what it is hoping to achieve?
A: The generous support of this scholarship has allowed me to investigate and adapt the use of nursing workload scoring functionality within the electronic medical record (EMR). It will be the first time an EMR nursing workload scoring tool has been implemented at the RCH, with the aim of using this score to inform the right combination of patients to allocate to an individual nurse or team of nurses for each shift. It is important to be able to predict and make visible the nursing workload so that we can have the available nursing resources to match the required care needs and ensure the safety of our patients. This project is helping to ensure that patients and families at the RCH can experience the best possible care.
Q: Since receiving the Dame Elisabeth Murdoch Nursing Development Scholarship and commencing the project, what progress has been made so far?
A: Since commencing the project, I have been able to travel to both Canada and the USA to learn from international organisations who are also using an EMR nursing workload score. I was also fortunate to be able to complete a training course at EPIC (who we use for our EMR) to equip me with the knowledge and skills to be able to deliver the technical side of
the project. Another valuable part of this project has been commencing research that has focused on how our nurses in charge make decisions about patients who require a higher level of nursing care. It has been incredibly beneficial hearing from this group of nurses to shape the project approach.
Q: What have been some of the findings you have seen so far and how is this helping to improve patient care?
A: I have been able to gather extremely valuable information from the EMR about our patients and the associated nursing workload. When we have nursing teams caring for unwell children outside of the intensive care environments, it enables us to provide specialist nursing care and helps nurses to develop advanced nursing skills.
Q: What are the exciting stages or milestones coming up for the project, what are you most looking forward to next?
A: I am currently planning for an upcoming pilot on three of our inpatient wards – Platypus, Sugar Glider and Kelpie. This is an exciting stage of the project as I will be able to work closely with the nursing teams to help shape an innovative approach in our EMR to identify higher dependency patients.
Nursing informatics are a powerful tool to help influence, inform and lead nursing workforce development and nursing innovation across the RCH. This project will have a lasting benefit on the care experience of RCH patients and their families, and the RCH nursing teams, now and into the future.