O1064 Oct.4: 4:21pm - Cross-Training NICU Clinical Experts to Transport: The Best of Both Worlds

Title: Cross-Training NICU Clinical Experts to Transport: The Best of Both Worlds

Introduction: Transport nursing is a nuanced specialty that necessitates dynamic strategies for recruitment, talent development, and retention. We employed a creative solution to accomplish these goals while simultaneously increasing our transport bandwidth through a unique partnership between our “combined” Pediatric/Neonatal Transport Team and the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU).

Purpose: To describe an innovative cross-training collaborative for neonatal nurses and the Transport Team that is standardized across practice settings and sensitive to transport program needs.

Methods: A phased transport orientation, including didactic education, simulation, and clinical time, was provided to a cohort of NICU nurses with at least two years experience. Leaders from the NICU and Transport Team met regularly to monitor program success and support real-time adjustments. Quarterly training, inclusive of both NICU and Transport clinicians, provided interdepartmental team growth and ongoing collaboration. We report numbers of NICU nurses trained, transports completed, and time to transport readiness for NICU nurses participating in transports. Qualitative feedback from both staff and patient families was collected via online surveys.

Results: Between September 2018 and March 2020, 15 NICU nurses were cross-trained into the transport environment through multimodal education, simulation, and sessions developed through individual needs assessments. Since program inception, cross-trained NICU nurses joined Transport as fully-functioning team members on 11% (67/594) of neonatal transports. Trainee satisfaction, measured by questions from the Practice of Environment Scale, was high. (see Figure 1.) Figure 2 shows responses from family surveys. In a subset of transports for which data was available, cross-trained NICU nurses were available within 30 minutes for 83% (48/58) of transports.

Discussion:
Transport onboarding requires the recruitment of clinicians with specific specialty experiences and skill sets, limiting the pool of qualified candidates. To address this issue, we created a collaborative between the Transport Team and NICU. Over 18 months, we trained 15 NICU nurses to function as Transport Team members. This expanded our team’s capacity and increased our availability for neonatal transports. The positive experiences of the participants (Figure 1), reflects the success of the collaborative. The expertise of cross-trained NICU nurses benefitted our Transport Team, as well as our patients and families, as highlighted in our family surveys (Figure 2). Including NICU nurses as team members did not delay transport, as the majority of NICU nurses were available for transport within 30 minutes.

Conclusion:
We describe an innovative Transport/NICU cross-training collaborative that improved our team’s bandwidth and was well-received by NICU staff and patient families. Next steps include training additional NICU staff and expansion to other critical care units.