A Victorian graduate nurse who designed a tool to help nurses provide more personalised patient care has been named outstanding graduate in the HESTA Australian Nursing and Midwifery Awards.
Veronique Murphy from Alfred Health was awarded for improving the care experience of patients who have difficulty communicating because they are experiencing delirium or have dementia.
Ms Murphy developed a patient preferences prompt sheet to facilitate the record keeping of patient likes, dislikes and interests, enabling easy communication of a person’s preferences between team members.
The tool ensures that vital non-clinical information can easily be communicated between staff, aiding them in providing compassionate, quality care.
‘The more we know about the patients, the more easily we can guide them through the times when they’re struggling to communicate,’ Ms Murphy said.
‘The prompt sheet… helps patients with the “little things”, making them feel safer and more comfortable whilst in the medical environment’.
Ms Murphy said providing individualised person-centred care was vital to ensuring that nurses have meaningful interactions when caring for patients. She plans to use the prize money from her award win to help pay for a Master’s degree in nursing, in addition to funding work experience in under-resourced parts of Australia and the world.
ANMF (Vic Branch) congratulates Ms Murphy, as well as Nurse of the Year Gail Yarran from WA’s Derbarl Yerrigan Health Service and The Kombi Clinic from Hepatitis Queensland, who took out the Team Excellence award. The winners receive $10,000 to use for further education or team development.
