Professional Education

The Challenge: Today’s nursing educators are faced with an enormous challenge—to help their nursing students make sense of multiple initiatives they will face in healthcare settings, from improving the overall quality of care, enhancing patient safety, delivering an outstanding experience that is patient-centered, and aligning their behaviors with an organization’s mission and values. The QSEN (Quality and Safety Education for Nurses) competencies were developed to address this challenge of preparing future nurses with the knowledge, skills, and attitudes (KSAs) necessary to continuously improve the quality and safety of the healthcare systems in which they work.

The Simple Solution to Aligning Curricula to QSEN: The StoryCare Learning System is designed to address this crucial educational issue, and is dedicated to bringing educational and personal focus to the “why” in addition to the “how” of treating patients. To accomplish this, StoryCare and its library of story simulations with accompanying instructional materials have been engineered to align with the QSEN core competencies, including Evidence-Based Practice, Patient-Centered Care, Quality Improvement, Safety, Teamwork and Collaboration, and Informatics. Not only does StoryCare help embed the knowledge, skills, and attitudes outlined in the QSEN competencies, it continuously improves the behaviors and standards of those nurses already working in a variety of healthcare environments.

Bringing the Challenges of the Hospital Environment Alive for Learners: StoryCare is much more than just an extensive library of healthcare related stories. The StoryCare Learning System offers nursing educators a wide range of real-world, healthcare simulation strategies for classroom and simulation-based learning. The fundamentals of StoryCare draw on cultural traditions going back thousands of years. From the beginning of human history people have been using storytelling to teach and engage each other with important ideas crucial to survival. Contemporary science has confirmed what ancient people intuitively understood—we are all “wired” for story. In fact, extensive research in the educational field and the social sciences has found that when coupled with reflection, there may be no more powerful “springboard” for learning and changing behavior than storytelling.

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Introductory Videos

StoryCare Overview

StoryCare Team Huddle

An Easy Interface to Manage Content

StoryCare makes use of the latest standards used in universally accepted online solutions to conform with any institution’s IT standard. Moreover, the website is designed to be responsive, meaning that users can access the site using any platform, from a computer, to a tablet, to a smart phone. All media is streamed from the web thereby not requiring any special software.

The StoryCare Library

The StoryCare Library is designed to make it easy for users to search for story solutions by department, outcome category—Patient Safety Culture, Patient Satisfactions, Hospital Acquired Conditions, Quality of Care, Staff Satisfaction and Professional Development, and Teamwork and Communication, TeamSTEPPS®, Infectious Diseases, and QSEN. The user is then provided an array of story solutions ranked to address their particular challenge, and all of the support materials to ensure their success.

The development of our library of story solutions is guided by professionals in the field to ensure that each story is both relevant and accurate to the concerns of healthcare professionals, and to optimize learning and a commitment to experimentation, innovation, and improvement. This collection of transformational narratives is informed by our team’s collection of stories from over 1,000 patients, family members, and healthcare professionals through our extensive corporate healthcare improvement experience.

All the Tools Needed to Ensure Team Success

The site also provides the user support, resources, and a number of powerful tools to achieve success, such as guidelines for observing and assessing change, a library of best practices related to the range of outcomes team leaders are seeking, a variety of communication tools to keep the team’s goals front and central, and a personal vault to store story selections for future use.

Making Improvement Simple

The Challenge: Healthcare leaders today are faced with an enormous challenge—to help their teams make sense of multiple initiatives to improve the quality of care, enhance patient safety, deliver an outstanding experience that is patient-centered, and align their behaviors with the organization’s mission and values. And do that efficiently with the highest professional standards! It is no wonder that teams experience initiative overload when asked to make continual changes on all of these fronts.

The Simple Solution: StoryCare® assists teams to improve their performance by using a simple learning paradigm that has roots in how cultures through the ages have engaged people with change. By placing the patient’s experience and safety at the center of your caregivers’ attention, StoryCare is just-in-time simulation training that helps them develop an easy approach to meeting the complex demands that multiple initiatives exert on busy schedules. In fact, it requires less than 15 minutes, and no online or classroom training away from patient care.

Targets for Improvement: Designed to integrate with Patient Experience (HCAHPS), Partnership for Patients and Quality of Care criteria, as well as TeamSTEPPS® (Strategies and Tools to Enhance Performance and Patient Safety), StoryCare provides a protocol for change that is designed and determined by staff at the team level, thereby maximizing ownership—a key with any effort to drive enterprise-wide transformation. Team members decide what behavioral changes they want to undertake that align with organizational expectations for improvement, and collectively choose which behaviors they’d like to adopt.

Engagement and Flexibility: StoryCare makes use of the natural social reinforcement that occurs when groups come together to reflect on their behavior and performance, and collectively set their sights on accomplishing a new objective. Because StoryCare is integrally linked to an assessment process driven by both patient safety culture and patient satisfaction survey tools, the StoryCare solution demonstrates clear, definable results by giving healthcare leaders a scorecard and a roadmap for future improvement actions. This is a simple, cost-effective, and pre-emptive solution to an accelerating business issue—instituting sustainable change that aligns team performance with escalating satisfaction requirements and safety protocols that are tied to reimbursement payments.