Elaine Marieb Center/Baystate Health Collaboration Meeting

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This story was first published by the Elaine Marieb Center for Nursing and Engineering Innovation 

The Elaine Marieb Center for Nursing and Engineering Innovation (EMCNEI) hosted nurses and nurse educators from the Baystate Medical Center Emergency Department on October 2, 2024 to talk about collaborations, needs, and ideas.  

This past summer, the EMCNEI team worked with Baystate nurses to develop a medical device handle. The handle enables a monitor to be functional for patient care, safely and securely mounted to a hospital bed, and allows nurses to give more focus to their patient rather than to the location/secureness of the monitor. Building upon that success, the group was energized to talk about future collaborations for current needs impacting nurses and their patients.  

Ellen Smithline, PhD, RN, CEN, Emergency Department Director of Professional Practice, Outcomes, and Quality at Baystate Health and UMass Nursing Doctoral alumna, brought the group to UMass for this conversation. She encouraged her teams to think about, “What isn’t working well? Where do you need some solutions?” 

Discussion points from the seven nurses, with backgrounds in the emergency department, emergency room, intensive care unit (ICU), oncology, trauma, clinical coordination, and nurse education, enabled a robust dialogue about intersecting concerns and how working with UMass could improve patient care and safety.  

Themes discussed included:  

• Patients’ access to care and information that can improve their health 
• Technology and care - how designs for medical devices can impede a streamlined flow of work for nurses and the care they provide 
• Workflow for workspace, how nurses move and need access to supplies to support care 
• Noninvasive ways to collect advanced hemodynamics that can promote care and stabilization of patients 
• How can communities gain more access to education about their health to increase prevention and enable nurses to be more proactive rather than often having to be reactive? 

“It’s great to be able to phone a friend,” Dr. Ellen Smithline, RN, CEN, remarked, describing the work being done at UMass as more than just a transactional relationship, rather it’s a coordinated relationship for design and product development which draws on the lab spaces and expertise of UMass and its faculty and student researchers.   

To help the Baystate nurses and nurse educators understand the researchers and their lab spaces, UMass faculty, EMCNEI leadership, and doctoral students shared research themes and areas of interest/experience before taking a campus tour. Center Co-Directors Dr. Frank Sup and Dr. Karen Giuliano, RN led the group on a tour of lab spaces in the Institute for Applied Life Sciences Core Facilities, Elaine Marieb Center for Nursing and Engineering Innovation, and Elaine Marieb College of Nursing simulation labs.  

“Inviting our partners in the emergency department to see our lab spaces, understand our facilities for testing usability, and have their full attention away from the floor, is invaluable. It shows the commitment on behalf of Baystate and its team to collaborating solving tough problems in healthcare,” Dr. Frank Sup, Professor in Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at UMass Amherst and Center Co-Director, shared.