Leading the way.

Kathy is a visionary leader in healthcare, serving as the Vice President for Professional Practice at Inova Health System. With a wealth of experience, she played a pivotal role in the customization and implementation of StaffGarden's Grow platform at Inova, ensuring the seamless integration of CLPs. Her insights into the transformative impact on nurse visibility and organizational goals provide valuable perspectives for healthcare decision-makers.

Implementing innovation.

Five years ago, Kathy became concerned with Inova Health System’s notable absence of shared governance; its decentralized structure hindered the ability to meet the needs of nurses and administrators alike. Kathy recounts the pivotal moment when a task force was initiated in February 2020 to systemize shared governance at Inova Health System, recognizing the transformative impact it could have not just on practices but also on the overall environment for nurses.

Inova had no system-wide shared governance, [it was] very decentralized, [and it was] less powerful because of that... having the voice of the nurse would bring not only improvements in practice but also the practice environment for the nurse.

Retention through recognition.

The accessibility of a digital clinical ladder signals the organization’s willingness to invest in, listen to, and support their nursing population, ultimately ensuring that a hospital can both attract and retain the best and brightest.

In the last year [Inova] has seen recruitment increase dramatically to around 850 new grads a year… [we’re] also seeing reduced turnover at about 2-3% year over year. [StaffGarden Grow is] one great big package about what the nurse feels that Inova is doing to make it worth their while to stay with us.

Global reportability.

StaffGarden's Grow platform provides reports that are designed to be customizable. The ability to set specific goals and outcome measures, coupled with the flexibility to access detailed reports, allowed Kathy to take a nuanced approach to aligning the platform with Inova’s organizational objectives.

In the build process with StaffGarden, we customized everything from beginning to end. We set up a list of goals we wanted to see as a first set of outcome measures, [and have] been building them ever since. [We’re] about to be able to launch details on those goals, [and it’s] exciting to see it come to fruition. On the measurement side, it's going to be so wonderful to not only have a report on that side, but we can go into that Excel export function and just get the details if we need it.