I am planning to initiate an Orthopaedic Center of Excellence at my hospital.

Our goal is recruit and retain orthopaedic nurses, and to promote our specialty unit.

Do you have any information or ideas as far as the criteria and guidelines?

Thanks.

Shelia,
We are in the planning and outline phase. We are a Center of Excellence for our Total Joint Program. We also see the need for Excellence in our TJ staff. Since the LOS is 24-72 hours we need to retain and recruit "specialty" RNs - we need a program to promote "buy in for the TJ team". I am the TJ Liaison Nurse and I am teamed with the Ortho educator on this project. This program is being developed with strong support/input from the 5 high volume TJ MDs. These MDs will be very involved.

We will try to have the program plan completed before the end of the year - so that we can present it to Hospital Administration.

I will keep you posted and please share any info you have with me.

Kathy Prim
Hoag Hospital
Newport Beach, CA

Shelia,
We are in the planning and outline phase. We are a Center of Excellence for our Total Joint Program. We also see the need for Excellence in our TJ staff. Since the LOS is 24-72 hours we need to retain and recruit "specialty" RNs - we need a program to promote "buy in for the TJ team". I am the TJ Liaison Nurse and I am teamed with the Ortho educator on this project. This program is being developed with strong support/input from the 5 high volume TJ MDs. These MDs will be very involved.

We will try to have the program plan completed before the end of the year - so that we can present it to Hospital Administration.

I will keep you posted and please share any info you have with me.

Kathy Prim
Hoag Hospital
Newport Beach, CA

We are in the planning stages of obtaining Disease-Specific Care Certification (Total Hip/Total Knee) by the Joint Commission Organization. And I will be checking this site for your updates regularly.


Thank you, in advance, for your input.

Shelia Williams
East Texas Medical Center Hospital
Tyler, TX.

Did you ever accomplish your center? I am trying to convince upper administration at my facility that we need a dedicated unit for ortho. So far all I've accomplished is the chore of doing a gap analysis to prove why we might need one. We attended TJV in Florida many years ago and implemented some things but not the whole thing. Some of us believe that we can really do this. Any suggestions? We finally have our physician champion and he firmly believes we are on the right track. I would greatly appreciate any information you can share on how you accomplished this.

Loretta, If you have your champion, you just roll up your sleeves and do it. WE got our Disease Specific Care certification in total joints from Joint Commission last summer. We had a well functioning joint center so we only had to designate our performance measures and then collect some data and make improvements. It's much more involved than that but the work is not difficult. It just takes time, cooperation and buy in from everyone from the administration down to the housekeepers. There are references to this process on this forum under the total joint forum.

Does anyonehave criteria for this and where did it come from
Miki

hello, i am taking the Ortho certification test in a few weeks. I have a review book and been studying but wanted to ask someone who has taken it how it was?? How much studying they did etc?? I took the med/surg national boards a few weeks ago and it was very straight forward.
my email is ramseje@gmail.com

thanks