Building a Confident and Competent Pediatric
BMT Nursing Staff
Jamie L Hillman, MSN, MEd, RN & Jacqueline A Watercutter, MSN, RN, NEA-BC
Nationwide Children’s Hospital, Columbus, OH
Introduction
Nationwide Children’s Hospital’s Bone Marrow
Transplant Program has the vision to become a
national leader in patient care that results in
excellent outcomes. The
Hematology/Oncology/BMT unit recognized
that BMT patients require competent and
confident nurses to care for the complexities of
the population. With intentional focus to
increase quality of care delivered, an education
plan was developed to ensure a highly
confident and competent nursing staff. The
secondary goal was to improve collaboration
amongst the BMT team members by increasing
awareness of who the team members are.
Literature Review
Development of Educational Program
When it was suggested we form a specialized team of BMT nurses, the staff were apprehensive, stating
they did not feel they were adequately educated to give care to the BMT population. As a result, a welldesigned educational program was created.
• The program was a collaborative effort between the Education Specialist of the unit, the BMT physicians
and the BMT nurse practitioners to increase awareness of team members.
•The Educational program consisted of 16 hours of education, coordinated by the Ed. Specialist and
provided by the BMT provider group. Educational sessions were kept to 4 hours to ensure retention of
information. The education was adapted from the APHON PBMTC lecture series.
•Nurses were given a pre-test prior to each educational session to both determine their knowledge base
and also to focus their attention on the important concepts of the lecture. Nurses were also given a survey
regarding their feelings of confidence and support in the BMT role.
•Nurses were given a post-test to determine retention of knowledge and were also given a post-survey to
determine if their feelings of confidence and support improved.
The following reasons for this intervention were
cited in the literature:
• Many BMT nurses feel they receive little
education to prepare them to give quality care to
their patients. Many BMT units are integrated
into Hem/Onc units and therefore, not seen as a
separate specialty with a unique knowledge
base.
Results
Pre- and Post-Education Survey
Discussion
•Based on the results of the pre-test and
post-test, it is clear we started with a
nursing staff that was more knowledgeable
about BMT care than presumed.
•Results for the post-test were clearly
higher after education was complete,
showing that education did, in fact, improve
the knowledge base of the nursing staff.
•The results of the survey conclude that
education helped the nursing staff to feel
more competent in educating families
about their diagnoses and treatment as
well as more aware of the resources
available to them on the unit. This
suggests that nurses felt more a part of the
BMT team after the providers spent time
educating them about the population.
Limitations
Limitations
Pre- and Post-Education Test
The limitations of this project include:
• BMT nurses report a need for continuing
education to ensure they are up-to-date with the
latest treatment options, and evidence-based
care for their patients.
• Multiple teaching strategies: live
presentation with providers and DVD
available of the live presentation if staff
were unable to attend, making it difficult
to determine the effectiveness of
education for everyone.
• BMT is a complex specialty that contributes to
high levels of stress and burnout; nurses who
perceived feeling supported in their work
environment report feeling less stress from the
demands of patient care.
• Not everyone participating was able to
attend the educational offerings live, so
pre-test results included multiple people
on different days, making the results
difficult to generalize to the entire group.
Ensuring the nursing staff receive high quality
education regarding the BMT specialty leads to
a higher sense of confidence in caring for the
patients as well as a higher level of satisfaction
with their jobs, consequently resulting in lower
stress levels and higher quality patient care.
• Not all participants completed the preand post-survey, again making it difficult
to generalize results to the group as a
whole.
References
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