On September 13, BCEN was pleased to announce our 2022 National Certification Champion Award – Large Healthcare Organization category winner:
Harris Health Lyndon B. Johnson Hospital Emergency Center
Houston, TX
What does being named a BCEN National Certification Champion mean to your organization and the communities you serve?
This award validates to the community we serve that the clinicians who work at Harris Health LBJ Emergency Center (LBJ EC) provide high quality patient care. It also shows that our nurses are committed to the community by going above and beyond to attain specialty certifications. This gives the community confidence that they will receive top notch care whenever they come to LBJ EC.
What sets nurses who have earned the CEN, CPEN, TCRN, CTRN, and/or CFRN apart in their daily practice and in their professional development trajectories?
Our high achieving nurses are committed to educational advancements and know the value of obtaining specialty certifications. The majority of these nurses also serve as unit leaders, preceptors and charge nurses, and are active on various committees.
What are the positive outcomes you are seeing and tracking as the number of BCEN-certified nurses increases?
Some of the positive outcomes we have seen include better patient care outcomes, elevated patient satisfaction, improved staff morale, and dedication to safe patient care. BCEN-certified nurses go out of their way to ensure their patients receive the best care by being better patient advocates due to their higher level of knowledge as evidenced by their certifications and advanced training.
What do you most want other organizations to know about why and how to support nursing specialty certification?
Encouraging and supporting nurses to get certified in their specialty areas ensures patients are receiving the best care possible. Specialty certification has the collateral effect of reduced cost related to safety events, increased staff satisfaction and overall higher quality of care.
Here’s what Harris Health LBJ Hospital leaders had to say:
“Our leadership team proactively promotes, encourages and provides educational opportunities for our staff to become certified because not only do we know that certifications are associated with improved patient outcomes but also because we are committed to growing our younger staff and providing them with every opportunity to succeed as ED nurses.”
“Although we are a county organization and are the busiest ED in the Greater Houston area, our patient satisfaction scores remain consistently above target, and we can attribute this high score to our high rate of BCEN certifications.”
– Director of Nursing Elizabeth Brewer, MSN, RN, CEN, TCRN
“Partnering with our emergency center paramedics and EMTs, the nurses created a team capable of providing high quality trauma and emergency care for critically ill adults and pediatric patients being transported for higher level of care. … The entire hospital knows that when a STEMI alert occurs, this team will be racing to beat the clock to safely and efficiently transport someone’s loved one in time to preserve their cardiac function.
A direct example of their effort is they are single-handedly responsible for a substantial improvement in STEMI transport times to meet AHA metrics for intervention and subsequent improved outcomes for our patients.
And that’s just one population of lives they have saved. For our patients with intracranial hemorrhage, or our polytrauma patients, or our large vessel occlusion strokes, this transport team doesn’t just make a difference in these patients’ medical outcomes. They demonstrate excellent emergency care and do it with compassion and dedication while also changing the course of their healthcare outcomes.”
– Hashim Q. Zaidi, MD, UTHealth Houston Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine, and Medical Director Harris Health System EMS & Transfer Center
