By Eric Peters
University Public Affairs

By Bianca Simpson
University Public Affairs

Wednesday, April 17, 2013

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.

About VCU and VCU Medical Center

Virginia Commonwealth University is a major, urban public research university with national and international rankings in sponsored research. Located in downtown Richmond, VCU enrolls more than 31,000 students in 226 degree and certificate programs in the arts, sciences and humanities. Sixty-seven of the programs are unique in Virginia, many of them crossing the disciplines of VCU’s 13 schools and one college. MCV Hospitals and the health sciences schools of Virginia Commonwealth University comprise VCU Medical Center, one of the nation’s leading academic medical centers. For more, see www.vcu.edu.