NORFOLK, Va. — Registered Nurse Kristen Danley recalls working as a charge nurse for the 5 West unit at Sentara Leigh Hospital. She held the responsibility of assigning patients to nurses but she says she noticed, at times, nurses would have a heavy workload.
“I wanted to evenly distribute that work to all of the staff members so that not one nurse felt like they were drowning in an assignment,” she said.
It sparked the idea to create a system to better assist nurses.
“From there, took the idea to the magnet council and then our research council,” Danley said.
It later grew to become the Patient Acuity Nursing Tool or PANT. The system, piloted at Sentara Leigh Hospital in 2016, is an algorithm used to assign patients to nurses.
“[It] allows us to better understand what our patients are requiring and then adjust our nursing team to better meet those needs,” said PANT Project Coordinator Kelsey Jones.
Charge Nurse Chrystal Stratton said before PANT you had to dig through charts to get all the details of what’s happening on the unit. She said PANT makes her job easier.
“Certain things are automated and added up into a total for me so I can see that number and I know ahead of time what my oncoming shift is working with,” she said.
It has recently garnered national recognition in the health field. Jones said it is being seen as a model of how we create workload tools because of its reliability.
“When we think about…nurse resiliency, it’s making sure that we are meeting our patients' needs but also meeting the nurses’ needs,” Jones said.
PANT was featured in the American Association of Critical Care Nurses, the Academy of Medical-Surgical Nurses, and the scholarly journal MEDSURG Nursing.
Jones said the program is being used in more than 100 nursing units across Sentara Health’s 12 hospitals.