VCU news

By Eric Peters and Bianca Simpson

The Hume-Lee Transplant Center at the Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center has been awarded a silver-level Beacon Award for Excellence by the American Association of Critical Care Nurses (AACN).

The Beacon Award recognizes individual units that show exemplary practice in improving every facet of patient care. The Hume-Lee Transplant Center earned its silver award by demonstrating excellence in leadership, staff engagement, effective communication, knowledge management, patient outcomes and evidence-based practice and processes.

Silver-level awardees demonstrate success in continuous learning and effective systems to achieve optimal patient care.

“This award says a lot about the nursing staff of this unit,” says Peggy Schaeffer, nurse manager at the Hume-Lee Transplant Center. “They are practicing at the highest level of professional nursing with a dedication to quality, outcomes and safety.”

VCU’s Hume-Lee Transplant Center is a 19-bed progressive care/step-down unit and specializes in care of the liver, kidney and kidney-pancreas transplant population (pre-, post- and current transplant). Its comprehensive complex care includes intravenous medications (titration of vasoactive drips) and immunosuppressant.

More than 50 percent of the registered nurses in the unit hold specialty certification and more than 70 percent hold a bachelor’s degree or advanced degree in nursing.

Other units at the VCU Medical Center that have received this award in recent years include the Medical Psychiatry Unit, Medicine Telemetry/Progressive Intensive Care Unit, Pediatric Intensive Care Unit, Neuroscience Intensive Care Unit, Medical Respiratory Intensive Care Unit, Surgery Trauma Intensive Care Unit and the Psychiatric Medical Unit.