August 14, 2013

2013 marks the tenth consecutive year that BAYADA Home Health Care founder and President J. Mark Baiada and his wife, Ann, have announced and congratulated the winners of the BAYADA Awards for Technical Innovation in Nursing Education and Practice. The awards acknowledge nurses who have made a significant contribution to either nursing education or practice through the use of new technology. Drexel University’s College of Nursing and Health Professions and the Drexel University Nursing Education Institute (DUNEI) are proud to facilitate the awards process. At DUNEI, which was held this summer in New Orleans, two $10,000 cash awards were presented; one to Marta Fernandez and one to Michelle Dang, PhD.

Marta Fernandez, RN, MSN, MPM, is the Innovation and Research Nursing Coordinator at the Hospital Sant Joan de Déu in Barcelona, Spain. She won the BAYADA Award for Innovation in Nursing Education for “The 5-Minute Program,” an ongoing program that integrates an interactive continuing education process into clinical activity within the workplace to promote active and collaborative learning.

Thus far, the project has distributed 88 five-minute, high quality video education sessions including topics related to patient safety, electronic health records, and patient education. This innovative approach utilizes bite-sized, focused education sessions supporting the nurse’s ability to synthesize content and apply it directly to practice.

Michelle Dang, is an assistant professor at California State University, Sacramento. She was presented with the BAYADA Award for Innovation in Nursing Practice for her project, HealthShack. HealthShack is a personal health record technology designed for homeless youth. Because it is web-based, HealthShack can be accessed anywhere and is a safe place to store personal health records, birth certificates, immunization records, and other important documents.

In the three years since HealthShack was started, hundreds of young people have created accounts, stored documents, and received interventions from RN and BSN program students. Nursing students have provided hundreds of hours of healthcare services through HealthShack as part of their community health course requirements.