06/15/17  Portland, OR

Sometimes a class assignment turns into something bigger and has far more reach than expected.

By Christi Richardson-Zboralski (email)

Cristal Salas, a recent graduate from the 3-year baccalaureate program at OHSU School of Nursing, Ashland campus, knows just how far-reaching a class project can be.

In Fall 2016, Joan Smith, Clinical Assistant Professor, guided Salas through the clinical portion of the Nursing Leadership in Health Care Delivery Systems course, that all undergraduate students are required to take in their senior year. Of the class Smith says, “This course provides the opportunity for students to witness nursing leadership and further to support the student as a leader in initiating, progressing and applying their project toward best nursing practice. It is a powerful experience. Students having had this experience will be better prepared to assume the role as a nurse leader early in their nursing career.”

Students were placed in various community settings to work with a nurse or community leader on an Outcomes Improvement Project to improve health care delivery in their setting. Salas was placed at Providence Medford Medical Center Spine and Orthopedics with Jennifer Brusca, Program Manager of Spine/Ortho at PMMC.

“We had a set of ideas that Cristal could choose from. One of them was figuring out how to make our pre-op education classes better for our patients who are undergoing hip and knee replacements,” Brusca said. “We kicked around ideas about just filming an in-person class, but that didn’t sound right. In the end, Cristal developed an idea to create a virtual patient experience through the total joint continuum of care.”

A lot of research and note-taking went into gathering information for these videos. Salas took and combined notes from the pre-anesthesia class, patient guides, and community seminars about the Mako robotic assisted hip and knee replacements. She followed a patient through short-stay to PACU to the floor and talked to nurses, surgeons, physical therapists, and occupational therapists – to get input into what they thought was important to include for each phase of care. Mayo Clinic has a YouTube series that Salas also studied. The research was pertinent to the success of the project. It created a framework for the video series itself and thus was born, The Total Joint (Replacement) YouTube video series. The series came out in late September, 2017.

Photo right: Salas presenting her project at the 2016 OHSU Leadership Symposium.

Eventually, Salas created a storyboard through PowerPoint slides that displayed scene by scene educational content and a photo of what the video scene could look like. The rough draft storyboard Salas came up with included content for 6 videos, each for a different phase of care; preoperative, spiritual, perioperative, inpatient, rehab, and discharge. The leadership class requires at least 150 clinical hours of work, but for Salas, time passed quickly. “I became attached to the project because I was able to combine my creativity with nursing and I wanted to do a good job because of the potential impact it could have on patient care,” she said.

Brusca said, “Using the Mayo Clinic YouTube videos as the template, she built storyboards for each of the proposed PMMC videos. Her hard work and dedication paid off with this project. We received funding from the Providence Foundation to produce the YouTube video series. Using the story boards Cristal created, an abstract of the project was developed for the videographers.” In Winter 2017, they received funding to continue and finish this project.

The true win for Brusca is that, “By creating an innovative approach to patient education, going beyond the classroom walls and connecting with communities outside the Southern Oregon Service Area patients will be better prepared for hip or knee replacement surgery resulting in potential decrease in complications and readmission.”

Salas is now working at Asante Rogue Regional Medical Center on the Neuroscience and Orthopedic floor. While not exactly YouTube famous, she does retain some credit for the Total Joint (Replacement) YouTube series, watch it here.