Brazil

Is nursing compatible with an entrepreneurial culture?

Read the original article in Portuguese here. The author, Bruna Nadaletti is a volunteer at Hacking Health Santa Catarina (Brazil) and a Nurse with a specialty in Adult Intensive Care. Bruna owns a Master in Education.

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Let’s take a moment to reflect on the following situation:

Health service users are much more informed and demanding than ever before because of technological advances. They tend to act as consumers and require that health professionals develop knowledge, skills, and attitudes for needs that were not previously expressed. Have you ever thought about that?

How many hours of their workday do nurses spend with their patients? Nursing is one of the professions that spends most of its time close to the patient. Nurses face daily with increasingly difficult challenges, and to solve them, it needs to put in practice creativity and to innovation. In other words, nurses need to get an entrepreneurial spirit. But now, as a practitioner nurse, I ask:

Are we, nurses, prepared for innovation and entrepreneurship? Do we feel safe for this, considering the training we received?

Well, we need first to talk about a little more about the distance that still exists between innovation and entrepreneurship with nursing professionals. This situation results in professionals who are afraid of doing differently, who end up suffering from intense pressures of the labor market, which is getting increasingly competitive in all areas of knowledge.

Most programs in entrepreneurship differentiate two forms: business entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship. The first form focuses on business and measures its success through economic and financial evolution. With the second form, the social mission is at the heart of the business model, and success is associated with the achievement of a previously defined objective. However, when analyzing the ultimate goal of the two forms, we can understand that both target gain and profitability. Nurses can do both, but the context will define the type.

Entrepreneurship gives nurses a new professional avenue

Whether autonomous or attached to a healthcare institution, can entrepreneurship be understood as the ability to identify possibilities and innovate continuously? For this, it is necessary for the professional to develop an interest in market issues, which he/she is already aware of real needs and able to react in an innovative way, address emerging needs, and bring valuable solutions thanks to his/her professional experience.

A practical example of innovation

As a concrete example of innovation in the routine of nursing, aiming to add value to care, I name the shift. It can be seen as a process that allows for the continuity of care through the organization and transmission of patient’s information among nursing professionals.

Nursing staff number has an impact on patient safety. Thus, some hospital institutions wanted to innovate and redefined the moment of the shift. The nursing station is exposed to many factors that may negatively influence the quality of information: interaction with other professionals, telephone ringing, patient calling bell, among others. Now shift happens at the edge of the bed, where professionals are close to the context surrounding the patient in question, visualizing everything essential to be passed on. With the possibility of innovating even further, the patient participates in the passage of the shift and feels responsible for his/her treatment, evolution, and safety.

About nurses in Brazil

Probably when you think about being a nurse, the first environment you experience is the hospital. Do you know why? Because historically, the professional environment of nurses is associated with a health institution, either public or private. Until now, we have not yet been able to consolidate ourselves as autonomous professionals, even though this right was granted on September 3, 1946, by ministerial order, and entrepreneurship actions were initiated by Florence Nightingale. To see change, a cultural shift is necessary, from the training of professionals in HEI to the professional’s understanding of their perspectives, which go far beyond patient care.

Due to imposed routines, most nurses can not see entrepreneurship as something accessible, demonstrating a detachment to related concepts, often not knowing what it means. To bring nursing closer to innovation and entrepreneurship, it is vital that you, the nurse, visualize yourself in this scenario and show interest, putting into practice creative and innovative attitudes. Innovation doesn’t always mean creating something from scratch, preferably adapted to the reality that will be implemented to obtain positive results.

Nurse wins top award for mobile app design at Hacking Health

How many times have you been afraid to show your creativity and consequent innovation by fear of making mistakes? It is not only with you but with a large number of professionals. Rethinking and remaking are part of the innovation process, which must be continually re-evaluated. Challenges and changes should be seen as attractive to nurses who want to innovate. Comfort zone should be disturbing, instigating new avenues.

Be the change who want to see

Technological and scientific development, which facilitates and favors necessary conditions for nurses to modify their professional and entrepreneurial performance, should be a reason for constant search of professional updates. To be seen as indispensable in a multi-professional team, it is necessary to adopt and execute a professional posture that meets the current needs and, with innovative and entrepreneurial actions, modify the experience.

When I speak about a lived reality, I am not just talking about the physical structure, materials, and equipment or insertion of technology in the assistance; I am talking about patient experience, which is one of the most discussed subjects at the moment. How can I improve the patient experience with the assistance of my team? Is it possible? Yes, it is! Here is an example, where innovation was allied with humanization: a project called “Cinema in the Nursery” was developed in a hospital. Patients with immunological conditions are gathered every week in an improvised movie theater in the hospital and allowed to have popcorn and juice. This action is multi-professional, coordinated by nurses, intending to relieve stress due to the period of hospitalization and improve the patients’ quality of life.

Innovation and entrepreneurship are growing within the nurse profession, which increase needs to disseminate perspectives of actions and instill the interest of nursing professionals to develop their potential and explore new professional scenarios.

I end my writing with a question, which I would like you to reflect on: what benefits do innovation and entrepreneurship bring into your professional practice? What could you bring of value and differential to your professional performance with innovation and entrepreneurship? I wish you a good reflection and until the next!


About the author: Bruna Nadaletti is a volunteer at Hacking Health Santa Catarina and a Nurse with a specialty in Adult Intensive Care. Bruna owns a Master in Education.

We count several nurses within the Hacking Health movement. Read the articles included in this article and watch the video to learn more about being a nurse-entrepreneur:

Windsor nurse’s health-care app idea a winner

Delphine DavanIs nursing compatible with an entrepreneurial culture?
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Patient Safety & Mental Health of Professionals

– Read the original article in Portuguese –

 

Patient Safety – Medication Mistakes was the focus of the 2019 Hacking Health hackathon in Espirito Santo (Brazil). This is my third year as a volunteer with this movement. In previous years, I had the opportunity to participate in the discussion on the following topics:

– Prevention of chronic diseases;
– Public health lack of money or management?
– Challenges of an aging population

 

During these three years, I have participated in several events with health professionals (public, private, philanthropic), entrepreneurs, managers, designers, technology personnel, and famous makers. If you’ve never attended a Hacking Health event, I highly recommend it! Excellent ideas and prototypes arise and benefit the whole community. 

 

Something caught my attention since the first edition I participated, no matter the environment (public health, private health, with and without structure). In all issues, the mental health of health professionals has surfaced. I have heard talks like:

“… It is useless having the most advanced technology if we are not motivated …”

“… As long as we are not treated with respect by our hierarchy, it is difficult always to be well to take care of our patients …”

“… Having 3 jobs and turning on duty can not decorate protocols …”

 

I am a psychologist with a specialization in mental health, and I have had the opportunity to develop my career in the public service (Family Health Program, Caps, Hospita gerall, etc.) and part in the private sector. And as it happened during a Hacking Health event, I pulled back memories and realized that this same discussion in the work environment is generally avoided.

The challenge of our 2019 hackathon is about reducing medication errors. And the obvious question must be asked:

What if health professionals’ mental health is correlated to medication errors?


And this question is international. In the US, according to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Interdisciplinary Nursing Quality Survey (INQRI), nurses experience depression at twice the rate of the general public. Depression affects 9% of ordinary people, but 18% of nurses experience symptoms of depression.

Ironically, health professionals, for many reasons (fear of losing their job, fear that the team considers them unbalanced, fear of showing weakness, etc.) are slow to identify that they are not doing well mentally. They usually attribute discouragement, lack of motivation, or concentration to the fact that they are overwhelmed or lack resources in the work environment, or even lack of appreciation or recognition.

They invented a name for this: Burnout Syndrome

Translated literally means burned out completely, it is a generalized exhaustion.

In the mid-1970s, the first studies appeared in the United States, identifying “burnout” as a syndrome manifested by the exhaustion experienced by workers as a consequence of negative experiences at work. The symptoms are very similar to stress.

However, burnout is always related to a work complaint that may derive from chronic and prolonged stress. Stress is transient, and burnout is continual stress where one is more and more exhausted. Studies show that the psychological profile is of a professional who is often competitive or likes everything right, with a tendency to be a perfectionist, among others. After the illness is established, it is common for the professional to present a lack of involvement with work, chronic stress, insensitivity to others, irritability, and irony towards co-workers.

And what are companies doing to prevent this from happening?

Throughout the year, I hope that Hacking Health promotes conversational wheels and clinics with managers, specialists in the area of People Management for the exchange of successful experiences in this sense. How much damage may occur if we do not take any action at all? For example, by taking care of the mental health of the healthcare professionals, would this not have a direct effect on the quality of the patient’s care? And may reduce the hospitalization time? – which has a direct impact on healthcare costs.

Sooner or later (hopefully sooner) entities will have to have this debate. But we are talking about health of individuals and we should not delegate our health and well-being to others. Yes it is necessary to deal with the day to day and demands, but everything is crystal clear: To be sick and/or exhausted or be hospitalized a little does not matter, the world will continue to turn.

We need to be our #1 priority.

Health professionals need this mental health care, and many do not admit they need it because they are in the role of caregivers. Talk about their experiences, what they feel, the possible causes, to be able to take care of the other without harming the productivity of their team.

By failing to address the issue we put the patient’s life at risk, that of the professional, and we miss the opportunity to guide and improve on Mental Health besides reducing the stigma, prejudice, and discrimination that exists.

We have a long journey ahead and need to learn a lot because there is no immediate revenue, but everything starts with a simple action:

Start talking about it!

About the author of the Post:

Alessandra Fischer is a volunteer at Hacking Health Brasil and the first leader at the Santa Catarina chapter. 25 years of development of actions related to Public Health more specifically in Mental Health with passages by the Municipal Health Secretariat Joinville. Zerbini Foundation, SPDM, and Joinville Regional Hospital. In these places, he had the opportunity to develop several actions from the reception, therapeutic support to patients and relatives, brief therapy and coordination of therapeutic groups

Pictures by Gustavo RPS.

Delphine DavanPatient Safety & Mental Health of Professionals
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