Tell me about your team – who’s on it, what do you do?

Our team is led by Laurene Vickers and consists of RNs, MAs, Radiation Therapists, MD's, and Physics and Dosimetry team members. Shared governance has helped our area improve communication and set team goals such as improving our patient experience scores by managing each other up through handoffs and introductions.

How does shared governance work within your team – do you have a board, do you huddle, how’s it going?

Physical Team Board: We have a physical board located in our nurse workroom.

How We Huddle: Huddle is held in person every Tuesday @ 3:00 pm to review PINS that have been posted throughout the week. All Radiation Oncology team members that are interested in participating or have posted PINS are invited to attend. We review PINS as a group, then decide if each one is something we can address as a team or if we need to advance it to local management (Level 2) or the Coordination Council (Level 3).

Can you give me an example of any exchanges around problems, ideas or needs that people had to decide as a group or collective whether or not to work on it?

Yes - multiple email exchanges around the problem of being an ambulatory department in a hospital setting with multiple procedures. The problem was identified by a new procedural nurse, Paige Stringham. She posed the solution to work collectively on implementing Epic support around restructuring documentation.

What impact (if any) has it made on the team?

The go-live took place in September with a few workarounds to fix some minor bugs, but for the most-part it has been a smooth transition to a more robust EMR to support the area of work that we do in radiation.