Exemplary teamwork earns an entire department an I CARE Award

Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital’s I CARE Award recognizes staff members who go above and beyond their regular job responsibilities to make BWFH a great place to work and receive care. The whole team in the Laboratory was a recent recipient of an I CARE Award.

The Department was nominated by their Director, Rachel Ambacher, after a particularly challenging few days. In her nomination letter, Ambacher described the situation:

In the early morning hours of August 7, the Chemistry departments primary and shadow servers that allow the instruments to receive patient orders and demographics from SunQuest/EPIC and send results from the instruments to SunQuest/Epic both experienced critical hardware and software failures and were unable to function until they were completely replaced and validated on August 9. With both servers down, it was necessary for the Lab staff to manually enter orders and demographics for each sample on our two chemistry instruments and once testing was completed manually enter test results into SunQuest/EPIC.

Chemistry saw about 550 samples on Tuesday and 650 on Wednesday. On average, each sample has 10 tests ordered on it, this translates into 12,000 test results over the course of two days that had to be manually entered into SunQuest/EPIC. Of these 12,000 results, only eight transcription errors were found, all of which were corrected within 24 hours. That is an error rate of 0.07 percent, which is astounding!

While this was happening, Core Lab techs covered benches to free tech’s up to help Chemistry, ran two benches, answered calls for other departments and stayed to assist even after their shift was completed without being asked. Everyone in the Laboratory assisted Chemistry through this tough time, not just the Core Lab techs. Processing fielded calls from providers looking for results, Charyn Wilson, Linda Martin and the Blood Bank all assisted in reviewing all the manually entered results. Charyn Wilson also helped in being the communication liaison between the Lab and the providers as we moved to correct the issue. All in all, this incident caused a major disruption not only to the Laboratory itself but to the entire hospital as well. The effect of this disruption was mediated as much as possible by the exemplary teamwork of the entire Lab staff to get the issue at hand corrected.

Laboratory staff were surprised with their I CARE Award by Ambacher and members of BWFH’s Rewards and Recognition Committee. Ambacher says, “I wanted to nominate my staff for their excellent teamwork, dedication and determination!”

Do you know a BWFH employee who has gone above and beyond to demonstrate BWFH’s I CARE Standards? To nominate a fellow colleague for an I CARE Award, please visit Vitals. A team of colleagues will personally recognize the employee by presenting them with balloons, a thank you card and a gift certificate redeemable in the cafeteria or Atrium Cafe. At the end of the year, all I CARE Award recipients will be invited to a reception.

Click here for a complete list of recent I CARE Award recipients.