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CHEO has hundreds of talented nurses including those who lead, facilitate and inspire evidence-based implementation of best practice guidelines.
They’re called Best Practice Guideline (BPG) Nurse Champions. In March 2023, CHEO achieved designate status as a Best Practice Spotlight Organization (BPSO) by the Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario (RNAO) by implementing five BPGs.
These are four of the champion nurses who are passionate about one BPG topic to help improve care at CHEO. They also co-ordinate and facilitate an initiative while modelling positive clinical leadership.
Meet Your BPSO Champions
- Feben Embaye-Dessta – BPSO - Assessment and Management of Pain
Feben Embaye-Dessta uses, and teaches others about, pain management strategies including Comfort Care.
“We want to minimize the pain before a patient actually experiences it,” said Embaye-Dessta, an RN who has been at CHEO with inpatient surgery for 11 years.
Comfort care includes topical anesthetics, breastfeeding, comfortable positions and distraction techniques to help children, youth and families during painful procedures.
The work entered the spotlight when children needed a COVID-19 vaccine, and parents sought various comfort care methods to ease the experience.
Embaye-Desstais a BPSO champion who helps share best practices for helping manage and assess pain in the various units of CHEO.
- Yusuf Hamidi – BPSO – Promoting Asthma Control in Children
Yusuf Hamidi, Advanced Practice Nurse in the Respirology Clinic, is a BPSO champion for asthma.
He helps run full comprehensive asthma education sessions to communicate advice to families and medical staff. These sessions mostly take place virtually and at the bedside for patients cared for at CHEO.
Hamidi, who has been at CHEO since 2020, said families often have some knowledge of asthma because of how common it is in Ontario. That helps when he shares the five pillars of asthma management, including what he considers one of the most valuable discussions around the proper use of a device spacer with appropriate technique.
“It’s really important because it could increase medication administration by about 45 percent, which is quite significant,” he said.
- Debby Voskamp – BPSO – Facilitating Client-Centred Learning
Debby Voskamp, who’s been with CHEO since 1990, is a corporate nurse educator who used to work as an educator in the ED.
She helped facilitate the use of BPGs between inpatient units and the Emergency Department, adding BPSO has helped CHEO nurses collaborate “for the benefit of patients and families.”
Nurses in the Emergency Department (E.D.) worked with nurses in the Respirology Clinic to make specialized asthma teaching more readily available to families who would benefit from it, to learn essential information to help them better manage their child's asthma, with the goal of lessening the frequency of visits to the E.D.
“We broke down a lot of silos and really worked hard to get everybody on the same page and using the same treatment pathway,” said Voskamp.
- Theresa Hawkins – BPSO - NICU, Advanced Clinical Practice Fellowships
Theresa Hawkins is a nurse educator with the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) who has completed two Advanced Clinical Practice Fellowships designed to improve supports nurses can provide families in the NICU.
The first fellowship in 2020 identified a gap in how CHEO communicates with families coming to the NICU. Hawkins helped develop a NICU family guide available on the CHEO website to introduce families to all aspects of care in the NICU.
The second fellowship in 2022 focused on helping families of babies who lack oxygen at birth and must undergo a cooling or hypothermia protocol. The NICU has introduced tangible ways for families to understand what’s happening with their baby.
Nurses offer families a small stuffed teddy bear called a “Cool Cub” – to compare the experience to hibernation – and they're encouraged to collect bravery beads for every test and procedure their baby undergoes.
“It gives nurses language to use ... to make it more accessible for parents to understand,” said Hawkins, who’s been with CHEO since 2007.
BPSO & CHEO
RNAO fellowships are one of the deliverables required for CHEO to maintain status as a BPSO, and the journey to achieve the designation signifies a long-term commitment to deliver the highest standards of care to our patients and families.
BPSO has offered nurses and other health-care providers the additional tools, support, and resources to aid children and youth to live their best life.
Happy National Nursing Week!
