CODE speaking with Jack Davis, MSN, RN, ONC at the 4th Interdisciplinary Conference on Orthopedic Value Based Care 2020

CODE speaking with Jack Davis, MSN, RN, ONC at the 4th Interdisciplinary Conference on Orthopedic Value-Based Care 2020

Session Topics:

• The TEAM Approach to Orthopedic ASCs
• Multi-modal Approach to Orthopedic Patient Education
  

Interviewee: 
Jack Davis, MSN, RN, ONC
President, National Association of Orthopaedic Nurses (NAON)
Hospital of Special Surgery, New York

Breanna Cunningham:
Hi, there. Bre Cunningham here with CODE Technology. I am at the OVBC Conference in 2020 here interviewing Jack Davis. Jack, thank you so much for the opportunity. So Jack is a nurse. He’s got his Master’s in Nursing. He works at HSS. He has been at HSS for how many years?

Jack Davis:
40.

Breanna Cunningham:
40, which is absolutely amazing. HSS is a world-renowned organization that is an absolute powerhouse when it comes to publishing and Jack’s journey there has been from bedside nurse to a leadership role, which we’re going to talk more about. Jack is also the current President of the National Association Of Orthopedic Nurses, which is so, so huge. I’m a nurse myself and love talking with other nurses. So Jack, I actually would like to start there. When it comes to your role as the president of this amazing organization, tell me about your goals and what you’re hoping to accomplish underneath your reign.

Jack Davis:
So NAON, I’ve been in the role now for, it’s a three-year term, so president-elect president and past president. So this is my presidential year. So being an experienced nurse with HSS for 40 years, it’s a lot of synergy with NAON and HSS. We’re dedicated to improving patient care through research, practice and education.

So my role in NAON, my presidential theme is Engage Your Core. It’s the tagline that I wanted to use and it’s really trying to engage others to become more involved in their orthopedic specialty. We have approximately 5,500 orthopedic nurses around the country, around the world who are dedicated to their practice and their specialty of orthopedics.

So we’ve seen a little bit of a dip in some of our other organizations and membership. So I’m trying to engage them to become more active. So becoming more active could be just attending sessions, reading the journal, participating in posters, trying to get them more professional. And I’ve learned that through my experience with HSS as well. So there’s a lot of synergy in what I’ve done for the last 40 years, what I’ve been exposed to and how I want to get people engaged in their professional activities.

Breanna Cunningham:
So I’m sure you would love to see more nurses at conferences like this and more members of your organization attending things.

Jack Davis:
Yeah, this is my first time attending this. I mean this is a great example of interprofessional collaboration and education and it’s great to see everybody at the same table talking about the anesthesiologist and the surgeon talking about how they can get patients from the inpatient population to ambulatory.

But it’s really important that you have a nurse in rehab and other disciplines at the table making decisions. The nurses are the ones who are there 24/7. They need to know how to prepare the patient, how to manage new technologies in the OR, as well as anesthesia. How to teach patients how to manage pain, how to assess pain when you have or moving sensation after these great new techniques are implemented. So nurses really have to be at the table to share with their counterparts some of the challenges that they have in practice.

Breanna Cunningham:
So that tagline, Engage Your Core, is Core an acronym or when you say core are you saying your core nursing team? Tell me more about how you came up with that.

Jack Davis:
I was at a leadership training as part of my development and lead into the presidential year and the leadership training, if you want to have somebody follow you, you have to come up with some kind of easy remembering tagline, sort of short, sweet and get people behind it.

So I learned that Engage Your Core can have many definitions behind it. So it’s purposefully ambiguous. So Engage Your Core to me, it could engage your core in orthopedics, right? Your abdominal core to prevent injury. So you can have nurses become more in tune with their own health status. But Engage Your Core team, like getting members of your team to use best practices that are developed in the NAON side of things to engage them to use it. Or Engage Your Core team to join the National Association Of Orthopedic Nurses or to do more research or to use metrics that can be again transferred back over to NAON. So multiple purposes and reasons people are coming up with new interpretations of it. So it’s purposely designed that way.

Breanna Cunningham:
I love it. I think it’s very, very clever and I’ve remembered it.

Jack Davis:
It looks good when we’re trying to promote our meeting in May, it looks good. It’s a nice little catchphrase.

Breanna Cunningham:
It really is. It really is. You made a comment today that really got the room talking during your presentation and that was related to standardizing protocols amongst your surgeons. So in your position that’s huge for what you do. Can you talk a little bit about that and how you’ve been able to utilize nurses as kind of that front line to help change physician behavior and just team behavior?

Jack Davis:
So again, it’s the collaborative seat at the table where surgeons, again, I work in an institution where for a total joint replacement there might be 35 surgeons doing the same surgery. We do a lot of research and some people have different criteria during the episode of care that they want to implement. But it gets so diverse you can have 30 different ways to manage pain, for example. And then the nursing staff is there to try to sort of untangling the mess of, this is this doctor who’s ordering this. So it’s not standardized. And then that delivery of that message can sometimes get confusing. So you can have a protocol and you’re following protocols, but if you have a different medication for 30 different surgeons, the message gets sort of watered down and it can lead to inconsistencies.

And then the patients don’t trust the provider because they’re hearing things from you versus somebody else. It just really muddies the water. So having the nurses part of the team to try to standardize and talk about the challenges of too many different variations is important for the surgeons to hear it. And that I think has pulled people together to try to standardize as much as possible. It doesn’t always work, but it’s a good voice from the nursing side to tell them some of the challenges that result in it. And I don’t think the surgeons know it. I mean we do service-based, so we have 30 surgeons. We just polled them and they didn’t realize how many differences they had for dressings, for DVT prophylaxis, for pain management. Once they saw it then they sort of came to their senses and tried to standardize. It’s still not 100%, but it’s getting closer.

Breanna Cunningham:
Right. So sharing that data and being transparent, making that information available led to a change in behavior?

Jack Davis:
Right. And just patient complaints. So they would get feedback and the doctors would come back to the nurse and say, “How come you guys not telling them this?” And we’re like, “Well, because we didn’t know that’s what you’re doing and other people are doing something differently.” So you have to try to give us a hand in trying to give the same message that we can make sure that we’re getting the right information to the right patient.

Breanna Cunningham:
Love it. Jack, my final question here is, you’re passionate about getting nurses involved in professional organizations and in leadership roles and you went from PACU nurse to the prestigious role that you’re in now. Give me a couple of reasons whereas a new bedside nurse, why it’s important to be involved in organizations like the one you lead?

Jack Davis:
It’s really about your own protection of your license and trying to make an impact on the patients that you care for. So belonging to an organization really gives you access to the current best practices, the education that supports your practice at the bedside.

And then I was actually introduced to it just, I worked for a surgeon and he was like, “You should go.” He supported it. So it was actually a surgeon who supported the nurse to try to move on. And once I got there and saw the other 1,000 people at this conference, it really empowered me and motivated me to participate in that. And then it’s just the same thing I get the most rewarding response I get now is encouraging and mentoring staff to get up there in front of their peers and presenting something on the work that they’ve done. And it makes me proud and you can see that it makes them proud to be sharing it.

Breanna Cunningham:
I love it. That’s awesome. Well, I’m so excited for Engage Your Core and to follow the progress of your organization. Thank you so much for being here at this conference and for allowing us the opportunity to interview you, Jack.

Jack Davis:
Great. Thank you.

Breanna Cunningham:
Thank you.

Jack Davis:
Thanks.