Photo By Petty Officer 3rd Class Meagan Christoph | BREMERTON, Wash. (Jan. 28, 2020) Hospitalman Mervan Cuevas ,left, and Hospitalman...... read more read more
The Labor and Delivery department at Navy Medical Readiness and Training Command (NMRTC) Bremerton overhauled their orientation process with the help of junior Sailors who saw a need and made it happen.
“Lt. Cmdr. Sondra Jolly was asking for advice and people who would want to revamp our orientation process,” said Hospital Corpsman 2nd Class Jessica Belfour, leading petty officer of Labor and Delivery at NMRTC Bremerton.
Jolly, a clinical nurse specialist for obstetrics at NMRTC Bremerton, noticed that there were some shortages in the Labor and Delivery – also known as Northwest Beginning Family Birth Center - orientation program for Sailors reporting to the command.
“I definitely recognized some deficiencies in our orientation program for not only our nurses, but our corpsman as well,” said Jolly. “So I worked with Belfour by initially looking at the corpsman competencies, the length of orientation, and things that we could do to improve the orientation for the corpsman.”
During this process, Hospitalman Merven Cuevas and Hospitalman Megan Schnell, both assigned to Labor and Delivery Department, teamed-up and volunteered to create a booklet for Sailors to reference while they are in the three-month orientation period.
“I went to Cuevas because I knew he had just gotten off orientation,” said Schnell. “I knew he might know the problems with orientation since it was so fresh for him. I’d been off orientation for a little bit and couldn’t really remember what I had trouble with. Also, he’s way better at using the computer and putting things together. That was all him.”
Belfour and Jolly oversaw the project and helped Cuevas and Schnell by editing and fact-checking the information that was gathered up.
“They would give me drafts and I would suggest things to add,” said Belfour.
Once the booklet was completed Jolly was in charge of approving and implementing it as an official part of the orientation process.
“The orientation process falls under me,” said Jolly. “They brought [the book] to me a couple of times and then once they sent me the final product, I was like, ‘yep, this looks great. Let's implement it!’ Now it's going to be a standard part of the orientation along with some other tweaks that we did to orientation, but I feel like since the book was implemented and the changes that we made to the orientation process as a whole, it's really improved the way the corpsman are trained up here.”
Schnell described that before the creation of the booklet corpsman would often go to nurses to ask questions that can now be found in the booklet.
“Whenever I had a question I had to go to various people to figure it out,” said Schnell. “I wanted to make it a safe place where you can be like, ‘oh, I can’t remember this. I’ll just check my book.”
Cuevas and Schnell included a host of techniques and facts in the booklet they created. The booklet is pocket sized and 32 pages long. It covers complex skill requirements like fetal heart monitoring to simpler skills like teaching parents how to properly swaddle a newborn.
“Sometimes dads are not confident with touching the baby,” said Cuevas. “They ask us how to do everything. They think they are hurting the baby, but they aren’t. They will swaddle the baby really light, but that could be bad because then the baby will get out of the swaddle and get cold.”
The booklet has given corpsman a ready, quick reference of facts and procedures as they are learning and developing in their rate assigned to Labor and Delivery.
“I noticed all the new corpsman that come in do really appreciate this and use it to double check,” said Belfour. “They have it in their back pocket. They don’t have to look through a huge standard operating procedure for just a little bit of information. It’s standardized a lot of things so that everyone throughout all levels knows.”
Jolly praised Cuevas and Schnell for their work and spoke to their project as a reminder that all Sailors, junior and senior, should bring up ideas they have in their departments.
“Everybody has good ideas and everybody should bring those ideas up to their chain of command,” said Jolly. “It doesn't matter if you're the most junior or most senior. If it's a good one you should take it and go with it. I think it shows that this was completely all their idea to bring this up and do this booklet. It's amazing. I think people should look at this as an example that if they have good ideas, they should take that to their departments or up their chain.”
| Date Taken: | 02.12.2020 |
| Date Posted: | 02.13.2020 09:31 |
| Story ID: | 362928 |
| Location: | BREMERTON, WASHINGTON, US |
| Web Views: | 276 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, Junior Sailors Improve Labor and Delivery Orientation, by PO3 Meagan Christoph, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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