MetroWest’s nurse educator consultant has done an excellent job training all relevant staff on Watson’s theory and the Nurse Caring Delivery Model.  The educator helped overcome initial nurse resistance to change.

The team-based approach both gave nurses more support, increased their level of professionalism and helped weed out weaker performers as their work was exposed to peer scrutiny.  In addition, the team approach has improved the satisfaction and commitment of unlicensed staff as they feel they now have more collegial relationships with the nursing staff.

Change is hard and requires  constant commitmentto make a model hard-wired.  Commitment and Advocacy by nurse leaders resulted in the project not only surviving the ownership change, but expanding to other hospital facilities.

The important elements of the model (i.e. communication, caring, team approach) can be adapted to any nurse-patient ratio or care delivery setting.  When MWMC implemented the model on a telemetry unit, they used different ratios of nurses to patients, but the same elements of care delivery.