The Power of De-escalation Training on our Adult Medical Surgical Telemetry Unit

A large number of patients on our adult medical-surgical telemetry unit have aggressive or violent behaviors. This results in frequent “Code Yellow” security emergency activations to obtain help from hospital security officers. Nurses and other direct care staff feel overwhelmed and sometimes powerless in these situations. A review of the literature on this topic was conducted. It showed that there is a rise in verbal and physical aggression towards nurses and hospital staff in the United States. Although the literature showed this trend, there was no definitive solution identified to combat it. Our approach in addressing this issue is to empower the nursing staff by having them take the Crisis Prevention Institute (CPI) course which will arm them with de-escalation and self-safety techniques. We anticipate a decrease in the amount of “Code Yellow” security emergency activations, and a decrease in hospital security officer utilization. Unit leadership has already implemented this nurse-led and driven CPI training during orientation for newly hired staff. The plan is that 100% of direct care nursing staff will complete this course. Our project’s principal goal is to improve the safety and security on our unit. A secondary gain may be increased nurse satisfaction survey scores in the domains of professional development and autonomyhttps://scholarlycommons.libraryinfo.bhs.org/nursing_artof_innovation/1012/thumbnail.jp