Advancing MaineHealth as a Learning Health System
The Library’s Role in Evidence-Based Practice for Nurse Residents
Some of our newest care team members are recent nursing school graduates. These new nurses come to MaineHealth with various skills, and clinical practice and educational experience.
MaineHealth Library and Knowledge Services is collaborating with nurse education teams across the health system to provide instruction and support for evidence-based practice. The library team is the first contact that our new nurses have with professional scholarly activity.
Promoting Proven Practices
The library’s evidence-based practice initiative introduces new nurses to MaineHealth’s learning health system culture and invites them to participate in research, innovation and patient care quality improvement projects. Nurse residents learn how to identify opportunities for inquiry such as:
- What are current hospital initiatives?
- What procedure or population do I want to learn more about?
- What are the challenges of being a new nurse?
In 2023, MaineHealth Library and Knowledge Services presented at 14 nurse residency sessions and reached 311 learners.
Our medical librarians teach them how to search, access and critically review clinical literature. Nurse residents use these information literacy skills to explore topics such as:
- Patient positioning
- Skin assessment
- Bariatric surgery
- Alarm fatigue
They then prepare posters on their chosen topic and share what they have learned with their residency cohort and nurse colleagues. Posters are accessible through MaineHealth’s institutional repository, the Knowledge Connection and have been accessed dozens of times – from here in Maine, and from as far away as Finland and Australia!
We are pleased to support our newest nurses and inspire their professional curiosity, commitment to quality patient care and help foster our learning health system culture.
MaineHealth Library & Knowledge Services
The MaineHealth Library & Knowledge Services department supports the clinical, educational, research and administrative missions. We partner with our colleagues to support best practices and deliver technical and content expertise for patient care, education and research.
iPACE: The Foundation of a Learning Health System
This year, the iPACE™ team focused its efforts on the operationalization of interprofessional team-based care across the MaineHealth system. In November 2022, senior health system leadership recognized iPACE by incorporating it into the MaineHealth strategic plan as part of our “Processes” strategic priority. This has positioned iPACE to be the foundation of the larger, five-year plan to become a learning health system.
Redesigning Inpatient Health Care Delivery at MaineHealth
By the end of FY23, the number of rounding teams working to launch the iPACE model grew from 10 to 36. These rounding teams represent a variety of clinical care units:
- Medical-surgical care
- Inpatient pediatric care
- Intensive care
- Surgical intensive care
The iPACE initiative is impacting learners of all professions across the MaineHealth system. With this foundational work, iPACE has attracted the attention of Dr. Holly Humphrey, President of the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation. Read a blog post about her recent visit to Maine.
Interprofessional Partnership to Advance Care and Education
The Interprofessional Partnership to Advance Care and Education (iPACE) model is a nationally-endorsed interprofessional team-based care and education model. Through iPace, we are operationalizing high-quality, patient-centered care and mutual respect while improving the efficiency and optimizing the patient and family experience.
