Heather Cook, MSN, RN, CCRN, NE-BC, CPPS, CNL, and Holly Losurdo, PhD, RN, CCRN, CNE, NE-BC, CPPS, the co-leads for the RUSH Critical Care Outreach Team (CCOT) traveled to Darwin, Australia, in July of 2023 to attend the International Society of Rapid Response Systems (iSSRS) annual conference.
Cook and Losurdo took part in two podium presentations. First, they shared the outcomes and structure of the Decompensation, Assessment, Recognition and Treatment (DART) workshop in their presentation, titled “On Target: Implementing a Decompensation Workshop for Acute Care Nurses.” The duo then presented “Developing a Critical Care Outreach Residency to Address Recruitment and Retention Challenges in the Wake of the COVID-19 Pandemic,” the CCOT’s onboarding re-branding into a CCOT residency.
“Both sessions were highly attended and created much conversation with attendees,” says Cook. “Many international CCOT nurses in attendance shared the desire to implement this type of training to acute care nurses in their organizations and identified clinical deterioration as a gap in knowledge in novice clinicians.”
Cook and Losurdo found it incredible how different environments and different countries experience the same concerns.