(Iowa Capital Dispatch) – A little-known, not-taught facet of the nursing profession is the art of the workaround, Allison Hurt said — taking something that isn’t working in the situation and making it fit for whatever the patient or fellow staff members need. When she started working in the University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics burn unit, Hurt said one workaround was cutting gauze and dressings to better fit the burned area of a patient’s body. Later, when she transferred to the medical intensive care unit that later became the COVID-19 unit at the start of the pandemic, workarounds involved using long lines of IV tubing to have machinery and equipment outside of a patient’s room, allowing nurses to administer medicine and check information while saving important personal protection equipment. “I didn’t realize I was innovating when I was doing it,” Hurt said.

In her current role as a Nurse Innovator Liaison for the UI Office of Innovation, Hurt helps other nurses identify challenges, recognize the innovations they’ve been making without realizing it and look ahead to how they can help others with their ideas. The University of Iowa’s Iowa Nurse Innovators Program connects nurses to the resources and expertise they need to turn workarounds into specially crafted, even marketable, solutions. With early successes from UIHC nurses currently getting off the ground, the program is working to reach health care professionals across the state.

UI Chief Innovation Officer Jon Darsee, who oversees and helped launch the program in fall 2022, said there are many programs aimed at helping faculty or physicians develop their ideas into products or services, but nothing geared specifically toward nurses. With his background in medical technology, Darsee said he learned early on to listen to nurses and their needs. May is National Nurses Month. According to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing, this is a “time to honor and celebrate the incredible work of nurses.”

The UI Office of Innovation celebrated the month by sharing information about the nurse innovation program and stories of nurses seeing success from their product development. Since the project’s launch, 1,300 nurses have engaged with the nurse innovation program, according to a newsletter from the UI Office of Innovation. There are 38 active projects in the program, eight of which came from nurses outside of the UI system, and several patent disclosures have been filed. There are four products currently being used by nurses. A requirement of a donation from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City was that the innovation program expand beyond the UI and offer opportunities to nurses across the state, which Darsee said was a brilliant idea that hadn’t come to him yet. “Contributing to the health and happiness of nurses in rural Iowa environments is one way this program can influence patient safety and ultimately the quality care on a local level,” Darsee said.

From left, Anna Young, Allison Hurt and Courtney Smith celebrate Smith’s graduation from the UI Nurse Innovator Program. Smith has developed a clamp to get cords and wires off of the operating room floor. (Photo courtesy of the University of Iowa Office of Innovation)

Each of the products designed by nurses have come from challenges they’ve faced in their profession or see others struggling with in the health care system. They’ve developed their own ways of dealing with these issues in the day-to-day, using “workarounds” as Hurt described them. Nurses commit to around 27 workarounds per 12-hour shift, Hurt said, and program staff learn about them by visiting different hospital units personally to speak with staff. “We’ve discovered that the way that works best is having nurses identify their challenges where they’re happening,” Hurt said. “It’s obviously kind of fresh in their mind — in-the-moment frustration is really kind of what we’re going for.”

Once a nurse has identified a challenge, Hurt said the program and its partner, prototyping company MakerHealth, work with the nurse on their schedule to further discussions about the problem, how they’ve tried to solve it in the past and what solution they’re hoping to develop. It was on one of these visits when Courtney Smith learned about the program. The nurse innovator team had brought their “innovation station” to a nurse staff council committee meeting and asked if anyone knew about innovation projects, which Smith had previous experience with at a different job.

For nurses just starting out on their idea, Hurt said the program provides them with a kit full of materials to design and craft a low-fidelity, or rough draft, version of their product. After figuring out what works and what doesn’t, the nurse has more discussions with the team before trying out new materials and designs, until they have a functional prototype. All of this is at no cost to the nurse.

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