Melissa Fitzpatrick began her career in nursing in the mid-1970s, after earning a B.S.N. at Gwynedd-Mercy College, and her M.S.N. at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a nationally and internationally recognized consultant, speaker and author on clinical and leadership issues in healthcare. She has said that she built her career on what she learned from influential mentors she worked with, starting from when she was a staff nurse in an ICU in Philadelphia at the age of nineteen. “I was taken under the wings of phenomenal clinical nurses early in my career, and quickly realized that nursing is the heart of patient care, and a true lifeline for patients and their families.” These role models taught her how to prioritize, how to think critically, and how to be an effective advocate for her patients and for herself. Before long the student had become the teacher, as Melissa Fitzpatrick began helping younger nurses both formally and informally. And then she got a big break. “When my chief nurse executive (CNE), Carol Hutelmyer, took a chance on me and allowed me to establish a critical care course at our hospital, a world of opportunity opened for me,” she recalls. “I started to teach critical care nurses and realized that I loved speaking in public and translating difficult critical care concepts to novices in the specialty.” Melissa Fitzpatrick has since held a wide range of nursing and healthcare leadership roles. Beyond her executive roles at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and Duke University Health System, she has also been the Editor-in-Chief of the Nursing Management Journal, the Chief Healthcare Strategist at the SAS Institute, and the Vice President and Chief Clinical Officer at Hill-Rom. Today’s healthcare delivery system is complex and multi-dimensional with many competing demands, regulatory requirements and caregiver challenges. Every day, healthcare leaders strive to achieve positive patient outcomes, to enhance the patient and family experience and to do so while controlling costs and optimizing caregiver efficiency and satisfaction. In doing so, healthcare leaders and their teams are held to clinical and financial standards of practice and must publicly report their performance against those standards. All efforts are to assure that care is safe and effective and that true value is derived from the services delivered.
Value Based Healthcare The demand for value based healthcare has never been greater. Delivering evidence based care that is based on quality and not quantity and on value not volume is a necessity in order to meet the escalating needs of patients and populations as well as to avoid the financial penalties incurred when value is not achieved. In order to demonstrate and document value, healthcare teams must measure what matters and share their results with transparency. Measure, Measure, Measure It is not enough for healthcare teams to measure results. More than that, the measures must be meaningful and tracked over time. Continuous quality improvement can only be achieved when benchmarks are defined and when performance is monitored and managed in a sustainable way. Many of the measures that matter are defined by leading national organizations and accrediting bodies such as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid and The Joint Commission. Healthcare teams are monitoring performance around specific far-reaching diseases such as ● Diabetes Mellitus ● Hypertension ● Heart Failure ● Coronary Artery Disease as well as around prevention and screening goals such as influenza and pneumonia vaccination and breast and colorectal screening. Measuring performance using these and other measures informs most population health efforts underway across the country in efforts to implement the Affordable Care Act and to realize the financial incentives achieved when the focus is on health and value and not on illness and volume. The Joint Commission’s National Patient Safety Goals To assist in all of the efforts mentioned above and to provide guidance to healthcare teams as they strive to deliver evidence based and cost effective care, The Joint Commission has set forth national patient safety goals to address high risk, high volume and preventable adverse events. The 2016 National Patient Safety Goals are to
Despite individual providers’ and teams’ best and most sincere efforts to do no harm, unfortunately, errors and mistakes in healthcare delivery still occur at alarming rates. This is not a new revelation to those at the frontlines of patient care. New measures, new monitoring techniques, new quality improvement frameworks, new team accountabilities and new technologies have all been brought forward to address the patient safety needs of those that we serve. In particular, new technology is introduced every day in order to enable best practices around each of the national patient safety goals mentioned above. Hand hygiene solutions help to prevent infection. Phone and texting technology help to improve communication among team members. Medication dispensing technology and medication reconciliation tools help to assure that medicines are used safely. In the operating room, efforts focus on team communication and pausing before beginning, assuring and marking the correct site of surgery and adherence to surgical checklists and defined evidence based pathways for all surgical patients. 3si is a technology that facilitates safe care in the OR and that addresses these surgical safety mandates in an easy to use and intuitive manner. Adoption of the 3si Hub system’s multi-user voice command technology has yielded standardized workflow, enhanced teamwork and communication and improved documentation in the OR. Surgical teams and patients benefit from the results. For more information about the 3si Hub to assist you in improving surgical safety, please contact [email protected] If you read “Melissa Fitzpatrick: Qualities of a Great Nurse, Part One,” you know that succeeding as a nurse isn’t easy. You need strong communication skills, emotional strength and empathy, as well as a passion to make a difference. There’s more to it, though.
Respected nursing professionals and industry leaders like Melissa Fitzpatrick possess traits such as those outlined below in addition to the aforementioned qualities:
Melissa Fitzpatrick is a nurse leader and healthcare professional who has experience dating back to 1975. She became an RN (Registered Nurse) in 1977 and, since then, she has held a number of respected positions in her field.
If the success of a nurse leader such as Melissa Fitzpatrick inspires you, it might be a positive career choice to consider. Nursing offers a number of rewards, such as those outlined below, to those who dedicate their lives to the profession:
Melissa Fitzpatrick is a motivational speaker, an author, a nurse leader and a recognized name in healthcare. She has more than three decades of leadership and executive experience, numerous association memberships and elected roles and many awards to her credit. When she takes the stage, she demonstrates an ability to engage, educate and inspire her audiences.
Speaking to an audience as Melissa Fitzpatrick does is not easy, and many new motivational speakers commit blunders that ruin an otherwise thought-provoking delivery. Examples of such mistakes to avoid are outlined below:
Melissa Fitzpatrick is respected as a nursing professional, an author and a motivational speaker in the healthcare industry. When she delivers a speech, she engages her audience and makes them feel inspired by what she has to say.
Inspiring an audience as Melissa Fitzpatrick does isn’t easy, and it isn’t by chance. It is a skill that she has honed over many decades and many addresses to a variety of audiences. Qualities such as those below will help you deliver passionate motivational speeches that can move your audience and make them remember you and your message:
Melissa Fitzpatrick is a healthcare executive who spent the first twenty-five years of her career in the Academic Medical Center setting going from Penn to Dartmouth to Duke. She is a registered nurse, a chief nurse executive, a healthcare executive and is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Fitzpatrick & Associates, a healthcare consulting firm based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She always wanted to work in a field that was devoted to helping those in need and found that desire satisfied as a professional nurse. She received her Master’s degree in Nursing from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984, graduating Cum Laude from this esteemed School of Nursing. Melissa Fitzpatrick has led a variety of teams with multiple roles represented on them. In the hospital setting, multi-disciplinary teamwork is the name of the game. Here are some tips for successfully managing a hospital.
Although some do not like to face this reality, healthcare is a business and must be managed with expert fiduciary aptitude. Eliminating waste, redundancy and futility are important achievements for any hospital executive. Managing the many human resources and not allowing personal preference to dominate decision-making is important to control costs and to standardize care practices. Including those closest to the patient in decisions that affect their practice has proven to be an effective strategy for engaging the workforce and empowering them to control their care environment. Assuring that the voice of clinicians is solicited, heard and acted upon during capital budget decisions, technology acquisition decisions and care environment design decisions is a key participative leadership strategy that yields success. Managing the data that drives performance is fundamental to the continuous improvement of the healthcare organization. Assuring that leaders have the data that they need when they need it to make decisions is a major focus as healthcare information technology spending dominates the hospital budget. Effective reporting of results and trends so that leaders can be as proactive as possible helps to minimize the chaos and reactive mode in play in too many cases. Effective hospital leaders place the patient and his family first and assure that all providers have the resources they need to deliver safe, high quality and cost effective patient care. Melissa Fitzpatrick is a dedicated healthcare professional who has had a positive impact for decades on countless patients, families and colleagues. She has worked as a registered nurse since 1977and has helped patients recover from injury, illness and trauma in the most challenging of circumstances. Her clinical career took place in the critical care environment where she built deep relationships with her peers and colleagues that have lasted for many decades. Melissa Fitzpatrick is a successful nurse and healthcare professional, but she was also a successful athlete in high school and college. She applies many of the lessons learned on the field and on the court to her nursing and leadership career. Many analogies can be made between excellence in nursing care and excellence in athletics. Here are some tips for basketball players who want to improve their free throw percentage.
The best free throw shooters practice incessantly. Some shoot 500 free throws a day, every day. They use the same routine for each shot and never vary from their method. Find a routine and a rhythm that works best for you and stick with it. Then practice it day in and day out. Melissa Fitzpatrick also explains that in order to make more free throws, you have to commit to your follow through. Don’t drop your arms once the ball has left your hands, make sure you truly follow through with the ball to get the best spin and arc. Repetition and rhythm make or break your success at the charity stripe. Monitor your results and analyze your stats. Try to keep distractions from your mind and just let the ball go in your rhythm at game time just like it does on the driveway. Practice makes perfect! Melissa Fitzpatrick is a world renowned healthcare and nursing leader who had worked in a variety of roles across a variety of healthcare settings. She is a registered nurse, entrepreneur and healthcare executive and is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Fitzpatrick and Associates, a healthcare consulting firm based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Thriving as a healthcare executive requires a focus on the mission and vision of the organization and a true commitment to patients, families and care providers. All efforts must be made to elevate the quality, safety and cost-effectiveness of the care delivered and to assure that care providers are competent, compassionate and available at the right time and place to meet the patients’ needs. Fiduciary responsibility is a growing and key element of the healthcare executives’ demands including managing the reimbursement and penalty arena, maximizing cost effectiveness, eliminating waste and providing access to those in need. Mergers and acquisitions are more common in the marketplace and healthcare executives must be able to collaborate with multiple constituents in order to establish the greatest good for the greatest number. Managing the many forces at play in healthcare has never been more challenging than it is today but the rewards have also never been greater. Seeing patients and families thrive, enabling caregivers to grow professionally and enhancing the health of our communities makes all of the stress and sacrifice worth it. Melissa Fitzpatrick is a world renowned professional in the healthcare industry who leads individuals and teams, works strategically and juggles many responsibilities at once. She is currently working as a registered nurse, a healthcare executive and a chief nurse executive. She graduated with her Associate’s degree in nursing in 1977 from Gwynedd Mercy College and two years later obtained her Bachelor’s degree from the same institution. She graduated Cum Laude from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984 with her Master’s degree in nursing as well.
Melissa Fitzpatrick understands the essential role that education plays in the life of a professional. Many students today are wearing many hats while in school. They may be parents, employees, caregivers as well as students and must juggle many responsibilities often as second careerists. Time management is an essential skill of today’s busy student. Setting priorities is critical and allowing sufficient time to fulfill each obligation is key to success. Many of us are procrastinators, but this is not helpful to the busy student with multiple to-do lists at hand. Using technology to help manage tasks and to stay on track can be very helpful. Keeping close track of your calendar and managing multiple timelines and due dates is the only way to excel in school. Some still like the paper and pencil method and others the more sophisticated technology approach. Choose a method and tools that work best for you and then use them vigilantly. Surround yourself with those who support your efforts and who share your goals. Create study groups and teams to share the experience with and to use as a sounding board when tension, worry or frustration may set in. Sharing the journey will alleviate some of the pressure and will make it a more rewarding experience for you. ASK FOR HELP when you need it! No one will think less of you for doing so and you’ll be surprised how willing others will be to run that errand, to watch the kids or to make a meal for you while you study for that exam or finish that paper. Stay focused and take the best care of yourself that you can. You need sleep, good nutrition and exercise in order to have your mind and body sharp and ready for learning and that marathon that is higher education. You will succeed and it will be so worth it! |
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