When local eye doctors made the decision to stop treating premature infants in Northeast Tennessee, officials with The Children’s Hospital at Johnson City Medical Center (JCMC) had to turn to physicians at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville. Physicians there would travel to Johnson City to check the vision of the tiny newborns – who often suffer from eye problems due to their early births – and sometimes, these infants would have to travel to Nashville for additional treatment.
Now, thanks to some creative thinking and expert teamwork at the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at JCMC, fewer and fewer of these infants are having to go through this process, and the healthcare providers who created this change have been honored with the 2009 President’s Quality Award.
“The Quality Awards at Mountain States Health Alliance are designed to recognize individual or team efforts to bringing positive change to our organization through quality improvement efforts,” said Tamera Fields, Mountain States Assistant Vice President for Quality. “We have numerous categories with winners from throughout our system and end up paying out more than $12,000 in awards. The top award, the President’s Award, was granted to a special group working in our NICU that has truly impacted patients by working to save the sight of premature babies.”
Project leader Lisa Carter joined her nurse manager, Renee Lowe, as well as Assistant Clinical Leader Jill Naylor and neonatologist Dr. Mike DeVoe in finding a way to keep more of these babies from needing eye treatment outside the region.
“The condition is called Retinopathy of Prematurity, or ROP, and it can result in blindness,” said Lowe, a registered nurse and clinical leader of the NICU. “Prior to implementing our changes, approximately 75 percent of our premature infants suffered from this condition and had to undergo regular eye exams, and in severe cases, surgery. Now, we have that number down to less than 20 percent.”
The team studied what other facilities were doing and went through large amounts of research into protocols to prevent ROP, such as improving iron levels and adjusting oxygen percentages in incubators. These changes dropped the ROP rate at this NICU well below the national average and are being looked upon as a best practice. Transports to Vanderbilt have also been reduced by 80 percent.
“The ophthalmologists at Vanderbilt who perform the surgeries on these infants have asked our own NICU team to share with them what they’ve done to reduce the rate of ROP,” DeVoe said. “That shows the impact this team has had.”
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