MUSC’s Surgical Intensive Care Unit and Burn Center have embarked on a series of process improvement steps to improve delivery of service to patient families while continuing to maintain a high level of quality care to critically ill patients.

The process improvement initiative, called FOCUS-PDCA, comes under the direction of newly appointed SICU nurse manager Mary Anne Healy, R.N.

A major project to change the SICU visitation guidelines is the first on the process improvement agenda. Family members are encouraged to visit during an hour-long visitation at four scheduled times during the day. Access to the nursing staff by the individual family members is improved by scheduling patient care activities around the family visit.

SICU visitation times are: 9 a.m. to 10 a.m., 1 p.m. to 2 p.m., 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. to 19 p.m.

An evaluation step of the process improvement system includes feedback from families to assess if their needs are being adequately met. The Guest Relations staff of the 4th floor ICU waiting room contribute to the smooth transition of planned visitations and provide valuable feedback from families to the SICU nurses.

“At present, feedback has been positive,” said SICU nurse Michelle Thompson, R.N., adding that the feedback provides reinforcement to all those involved in the process improvement project. “The change to planned visitations has meant that SICU nurses are ‘family intensive’ as well as ‘patient intensive.’”

The SICU is a 16-bed unit juxtaposed to the Burn Center on the 4th floor of the Medical Center. In the past, the SICU was divided into two separate units and even today is sometimes referred to as the Neuro/Intensive Care Unit and the Surgical/Trauma Intensive Care Unit.

Although the SICU may be referred to by other names, it remains a single unit, the SICU, with a patient population that includes the victims of such acute trauma as motor vehicle accidents, parachuting accidents, and shootings. These patients suffer from such injuries and illnesses as cerebral hemorrhages, brain tumors and spinal cord injuries, high risk surgery patients and patients who received a liver transplant.

The SICU nursing staff is skilled in the specialized nursing care these critically ill patients require, Thompson said.