Zelda Bernardo, Registered Nurse at Kensington Gardens, won the Clinical Support Tool Excellence Award at the Ontario Long-Term Care Association’s This is Long Term Care conference.
At Kensington Health, quality improvement is an integral part of everything we do. Employees are encouraged to continuously look for ways to improve processes and initiate new projects to enhance the experience of people in our care. This commitment made creating our own Quality Day, and participating in Change Day Ontario, a natural fit.
Kensington's Quality Day is an annual event dedicated to quality improvement, and overcoming quality challenges. The day is filled with guest speakers, panels and presentations, and is a dedicated day for staff to showcase their accomplishments and improvements from the past year. The event is one of the ways in which Kensington Health is continuing to build a culture of quality throughout the organization.
It started with an idea
Zelda Bernardo is a Registered Nurse who hass been working at Kensington Health for 16 years. In 2017, she noticed that the nursing team did not have specific supplies readily available to provide care to residents who were approaching end-of-life.
Zelda came up with the quality improvement idea of putting together end-of-life care kits to ensure the nursing team had everything they needed on-hand to provide care and symptom management. The kits allow nurses to fully dedicate their time to residents, and drastically reduce the amount of time needed to gather supplies.
Since implementation, the end-of-life kits are continuing to evolve. Recently, the nursing team added a special mouth-spray to prevent dryness and give comfort to residents to improve quality of care.
The impact of Change Day
Change Day is a movement aimed to improve compassionate quality care. It is designed to create a vision for people to make positive changes, through making pledges and taking actions, big or small, to elevate care.
For Change Day, and her Quality Improvement Poster, Zelda pledged to “recognize differences and preferences of residents and incorporate them into their plan of care for a better delivery and quality of life.”
Since her pledge, Zelda has become a quality champion for providing end-of-life care at Kensington and has inspired the team to recognize opportunities to improve symptom management at the end-of-life.
This year, Zelda led the charge in developing a new clinical assessment tool for palliative care end-of life management at Kensington Health. Her quality leadership was recognized by the Ontario Long-Term Care Association (OLTCA), rewarding her with the 2018 OLTCA Clinical Support Tool Excellence Award.
“Simple things make a big difference,” said Zelda, who is very excited to post her new Change Day pledge for 2018. “Your pledge should help guide you in your role. If you’re passionate about what you do, you will end up satisfied and happy.”
Kensington Health employees created Quality Improvement Posters on how they tackled their own quality challenges.
Creating a vision that pulls the system
Catherine Wang, Vice President of Clinical Operations & Diagnostic Partnerships at University Health Network (UHN), was the guest speaker at Kensington's Quality Day on November 22, 2018.
The guest speaker of this year's Quality Day was Catherine Wang, Vice President of Clinical Operations & Diagnostic Partnerships at University Health Network (UHN).
In her speech, Catherine shared how vision can guide you in achieving your quality goals.
"Your vision creates the purpose that you've come here and want to deliver more," said Catherine. "If you are working on something exciting that you really care about, you don’t have to be pushed, your vision will pull you."
Catherine believes you can achieve your quality improvement vision by engaging with your team, which will allow your vision to ripple throughout the organization.