Nursing’s Culture of Safety
Celebrate National Nurses Week — May 6-12.
This year’s National Nurses Week theme, a culture of safety, is the perfect fit for our nurses, who are dedicated to improving patient satisfaction and safety in innovative ways. Quality is Job 1 at UF Health, and our nurses work tirelessly to provide the highest-quality care and most attentive service. Safety is integral to quality care, and our nurses strive to ensure that each patient feels informed about our practices and comfortable with their care.
Every day our nurses collaborate with interdisciplinary staff — like teams from the UF Health Sebastian Ferrero Office of Clinical Quality and Patient Safety and UF Health Shands Operations — to follow processes and protocols that improve care and meet our patients’ needs for a positive experience. These include following a patient wish list, which reflects the top 10 requests made by patients, and nurse-patient rounding, which allows nurses to assess and meet their patients’ needs.
In honor of National Nurses Week, May 6-12, our nurses shared their perspectives on the importance of safety in our nursing culture.

Describe the responsibility of providing health care to our patients.
“It’s an honor to know that our patients entrust our clinical staff and me with their lives. Being admitted to a hospital unexpectedly can be one of the most challenging times in someone’s life. It affects them and their family. At UF Health Shands, we provide both physical and emotional support for our patients to improve their health.”

How does UF Health’s culture of safety affect your unit?
“It encourages open communication. We are constantly discussing some aspect of patient, or even employee, safety. Our manager and clinical leader teach us and provide updates on safer practices. They consistently re-evaluate and improve processes to help improve patient safety. We hear the word accountability a lot, and that concept is reflected in the policies and procedures of the hospital.”

How do you define patient safety?
“Patient safety isn’t just about administering the right medicine, it also includes the environment that we provide. It’s making sure that the patient is knowledgeable about the care they’re receiving and that each staff person is an advocate for their patients. No two patients are exactly the same, which means we must adapt our safety protocols to each patient’s needs.”
Join our nursing staff and leaders at 10 a.m. Friday, May 6 at the UF Health Shands Hospital Atrium for a proclamation by Gainesville Mayor Lauren Poe to kick off National Nurses Week. To learn more about our nursing teams, read other editions of News+Notes at news-notes.UFHealth.org. In our June edition we will highlight our SAGE nursing program, which takes advantage of our most experienced nurses’ skills.