The AMSN Convention is the premier venue for advancing research in the medical-surgical nursing specialty. The AMSN Digital Content Committee and Podcast Subcommittee spent time this week meeting with and interviewing posters presenters. Read on to learn how they are advancing new knowledge.
Sandra from Baptist Health in Miami, Florida, identified an opportunity to improve EBP education for novice nurses. She now provides hands-on EBP education, including literature review practice and dissemination of findings, to all novice nurses during orientation. She has been to many AMSN conventions and previously presented on her virtual escape room design.
Katrina Collazo de Armas
Check out Katrina’s poster interview on AMSN’s Instagram account!
Helen Grace Baldo and Patrice Hadnot
We implemented this project over a total of more than three years, and from the start in 2022 we had 22 hospital acquired pressure injury and as of July 2025, we had zero. When we started this project, of course, we knew that we had to do something about it because we are not providing the quality care to our patients. We did the plan, do, check, act, at first, and we knew that we had to improve.
Our goal at first was just to decrease the falls by 50% from 2022. We were aiming for 11 hospital acquired pressure injury in our unit, but at the end of 2023 we only had six. That was a big dip, and we exceeded our goal. Patrice is a skin champion. And with Christabel Okumo, they were actually the ones who were patiently auditing our patients whose Braden scores are 18 and below, or 19 and below, so that we could prevent the pressure injuries from those vulnerable patients that could potentially acquire pressure injury in our unit.
These are our interventions. We have the four by four, four eyes and two RN assessment. We call it four by four in four hours. When we admit our patients to the unit, we make sure that we assess the patient's skin within four hours, and there should be two nurses assessing the skin. And this is translated into a nursing note in the patient's chart in EPIC. There are two signers: the person who is admitting the patient and the co-signer is another nurse. For patients who score lower than 19, we have everything in place like nutrition assessment, because nutrition is one key component of the patient not having pressure injury.
We also have this skin algorithm. When a patient comes to our unit, if they have a wound, we don't necessarily have to go straight to consulting the wound care nurses. We have an algorithm that tells us what we can do as the bedside nurse to help heal it, whether it be a skin tear or something minor. Basically, the wound care nurses prefer to only be consulted for the bigger cases like stage three pressure injuries, so they've given us an algorithm that tells us what we can do as the bedside nurse whether it be applying the hydrogel to the wound area. If we were to do that and we didn't see any improvement, then we can consult.
Lisa Eaves and Marietta Abernathy
We look at workplace violence events, every workplace violence event that occurs. We do a safety call twice a week. For example, on Friday, any event that has happened since Tuesday, we review at a leadership level in detail, debrief it, and discuss how we could mitigate it from happening again. What happened with this workplace violence event? What caused it? Is there something that we can do to prevent it from happening a second time?
In addition to the workplace violence event, we also talk about things that are a safety issue. For example, we had an opportunity with safety and being able to come into the hospital when we had an unsecured door. We talked about being able to make sure that we had secured doors and secured areas within the facility. We also review and talk about any external events that happen and make sure that we plan for and debrief those as a multidisciplinary team.
I think that's the most important thing about this: It's a multidisciplinary team. We have nursing managers from all of the units. We have our safety officer, emergency management, and public safety that is on this call twice a week. As we're doing this, we have actually found policies that are contradictory to each other. For example, we had a security policy and a nursing policy that contradicted each other, so we're able to correct those and make them so that they are aligned. We do have metal detectors at every entrance, so from a safety perspective, we're able to make sure that our facility is safe. On the poster, we have a depiction of where we have our metal detector. And when we implemented the metal detector, you can see that we had an increase in the number of weapons that we were able to prevent from coming into the facility.
Danika Mills, MBA, MSN, RN
Hear from Danika Mills, who speaks about her research, “Implementing House-Wide CHG Application: Medical-Surgical Unit Pilot.”
Lariea Morrow, MSN, APRN, AGCNS-BC, CMSRN
Lariea Morrow shares insights from her poster, “Optimizing Acute Care: Upskilling for Heart, Vascular and Thoracic Patient Management.”
Tina Hai, BSN, RN, MEDSURG-BC
Tina Hai’s research emphasizes the importance of staff safety. Hear directly from Tina in this video interview about her research, “Improving Staff Safety: Violence Assessment in Hospitals.”
With nearly 100 posters on display at #AMSN2025, innovation and evidence-based practice were abound. In the coming months, keep an eye on the Monitor for feature, in-depth interviews with some of our esteemed posters presenters.