Hospital & Program Description

Bon Secours St. Francis Hospital is a 250- bed community hospital located in Greenville, SC. The palliative care consult service began seeing patients Nov. 6, 2006 and has been averaging 30+ new patients a month. Initially, the palliative care team consisted of an APRN, a business manager, a part-time chaplain and a secretary.

Challenge:

Demand far exceeded the APRN’s availability to complete both new consults and follow up visits. We needed to convince administration to hire another nurse ASAP before we started losing consults due to frustrated physicians and staff.

We had a few months worth of historical data to show our current volumes but we needed help knowing what volumes we should be doing for a hospital our size with only one APRN.

In January, 2007, after attending the CAPC PCLC at Fairview Hospital in Minneapolis, we contacted Lyn Ceronsky asking for help with projected volumes for our consult service. Within 24 hours, she provided the numbers, which were about half the volume we were currently doing.

Outcome:

On March 18, our new RN Coordinator began her orientation training with the APRN on the palliative care consult service at St. Francis.

Lessons Learned:

• Need administration’s support - Palliative Care is a corporate initiative within Bon Secours Health System.
• Include a data analyst as part of the initial model for the consult service – our business manager had the time and expertise to track and pull the data and put it into a concise proposal.
• Save time in recruitment and training of additional staff by finding an internal candidate.