October conference will showcase best practices
Get good benchmarking background
Need the tools to launch a benchmarking initiative? Want to know how to create a culture that supports best practices? Could you use some new ideas on treating congestive heart failure or reducing cesarean rates?
You can get the answers to those questions plus more about the operational and clinical issues surrounding benchmarking at a new conference sponsored by the first organization to bring together the country's top nursing leaders. The Best Practice Network, founded two years ago by 13 nursing associations to promote information-sharing in health care, will hold its first Showcase for Innovation and Best Practices Oct. 2-4 in Chicago.
Conference provides collaboration
The conference is designed for nurses, physicians, administrators, managers - in short, anyone who is interested in best practices from the bedside to the boardroom, says Mary Kingston, RN, MN, director of the Best Practice Network. "It's a broad group of people, but none of them can act in isolation," she says. "We're trying to really promote collaboration, to get people in these different positions to start looking at each other as real team members. The Showcase offers a little bit for everybody, with topics that will stretch people in different ways."
Administrators might be especially interested in hearing keynote speakers Tim Porter O'Grady, an international health care consultant, and Gerry Faust of Faust Management Corp., Kingston says. Physicians and nurses could check out case studies of breakthrough programs in chest pain clinics, geriatric care, congestive heart failure, cesarean rates and nosocomial infections. Novices will discover ways to get started in sessions that demonstrate how to create and document a best-practices program.
Plus, there's the usual conference benefit of networking with colleagues from around the country. The BPN will make that process easier by providing you with contact information on speakers and attendees and by holding a luncheon where you can participate in small group discussions with speakers.
"We want it to be provocative," Kingston says. "We want people to leave changed, to look at their practice in a completely different way. We want them to go back not just charged up and excited like everybody tends to get at a conference, but to really go back and make some meaningful changes."
[For more information about the conference, visit the Best Practice Network's Web site at http://www.best4health.org or call (800) 899-2226 or (949) 362-2050, ext. 375. You can register on-line or fill out the form included in this issue of Healthcare Benchmarks. A special rate is being offered to Healthcare Benchmarks subscribers.]
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