At The Bedside: Creating A Nursing Podcast
Summary
This fellowship focused on creating At the Bedside podcast and on creating myself as a nurse podcaster. I worked on the fellowship part-time from May to December while concurrently working as a staff nurse at Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto in surgical oncology. Mount Sinai is an acute care teaching hospital, part of Sinai Health System and affiliated with the University of Toronto.
Many health professionals are using digital communication technologies to engage in professional development and ongoing education. I like the portability and ease of access of a podcast and I had access to high-quality audio equipment and expertise. There are very few podcasts about health care from the perspective of the nurse and in most of the popular medical education podcasts, nurses and other health providers are largely invisible.
The experiences I have had with efforts to influence practice change at the unit-level have reinforced the challenges of sharing information within our work environments. There are constraints of space, time, scheduling. I wondered if I created a podcast and tried to find ways to make the information accessible and interesting, whether it could help support organizational goals of providing evidence-informed, high quality patient care. I wanted to practice listening and facilitating to help identify
what are some of the issues that are most relevant to our practice and reflect organizational priorities. And to listen purposefully to what patients and families are telling us about the care we provide.
Our workplaces are full of knowledgeable, skilled clinicians working with the same patients. I think there is value in having evidence-informed discussions about patient care across professional boundaries and sharing them openly and that digital media can help to facilitate the sharing. It role-models collaboration, it offers contextualized educational content, and it offers an opportunity for professional development for those health professionals who are making that particular episode.
Of course, producing a podcast turns out to take quite a lot of work and I had to learn a lot in order to do it. Personally, I focused very heavily on listening to what others in the organization are saying through meetings, committees, casual conversation, patient care, and through interviewing guests for episodes. I have developed a better understanding of and empathy for the complexity of modern health care. Listening also helps me choose the topics that I think will resonate with listeners and build value with the organization. Relationships are at the heart of this project both for finding guests and for sharing and promoting the content. I have been very fortunate to have established some key relationships with some very helpful and supportive people both within and outside Mount Sinai. This project would not be possible without them. I have gained skills in research. I have learned to record and edit audio, much of it through trial and error. I have developed systems for organizing and streamlining as much of the production as possible. I coordinated graphic design, theme music, made a website, coordinated hosting on major podcast platforms, and developed a social media strategy. These are all valuable skills in managing a project and are valuable digital media skills to build on in my future career.
Outcomes
The research, reflection, discussions, interviews and the process of editing the podcast episodes improved my knowledge in a few key areas that I think are valuable to patients and families. These include patient and family-focused communication, pain management, IV fluid management, and the evidence that comprises ERAS. Within a surgical population, these are highly relevant topics and my practice and the way that I advocate for patients and collaborate with my colleagues around these
issues changed significantly. Regarding long-term outcomes, I made relationships and gained a lot of knowledge related to quality improvement and how the organization is planning to put structures in place to support clinicians to engage in quality improvement. I also created content with our senior director of quality and patient safety to share her knowledge of quality improvement and the organization's vision. This foundation will support my work within the unit council as the hospital invests in quality improvement within the surgical program. I am currently developing content to support the hospital's initiatives to promote antibiotic stewardship across disciplines. The audio content will be part of broader educational initiatives to support patient care. The content is unique because it is made by practicing clinicians and discusses context and the complex challenges of our work environment.
I engaged multiple colleagues in selecting topics, appraising literature, discussing the podcast content and planning upcoming episodes. Workplace culture and joy in work are intangible and difficult to measure, but their importance is widely acknowledged. A podcast to highlight the knowledge and skills of nurses, to provide opportunity to share our expertise and the introduction of new evidence and perspectives contributes to improving the experience in the workplace. My colleagues are giving me this feedback verbally, with digital comments and reviews, through emails and invitations to speak to nursing students. The guests I have interviewed have been overwhelmingly positive about the experience. The episodes of the first season, launched with minimal promotion starting in mid-November, have already been downloaded over 2000 times. With ongoing funding through Sinai Health System and the Registered Nurses Foundation of Ontario, I will be able to build on my learning and produce a second season of At The Bedside and work with experienced mentors to evaluate the value of the content to practicing nurses and to promote the content to nurses within and beyond Mount Sinai Hospital.
Overall experience
I am so grateful for the experience of this fellowship. When I first began, I did not realize what a serious project it would be to create a sustainable podcast. I learned many things along the way and there are many tasks and aspects of running a podcast that I had not anticipated. I learned about the importance of systems and data management and a social media strategy. I learned about the vulnerability of listening to my own voice, publishing my writing, of admitting what I don't know. I gained the courage to approach people across boundaries of profession, hierarchy and to ask my colleagues, my patients and their families for honest feedback. I am learning to see strength and expertise where I may not have noticed it before. The greatest benefit of this experience was the time. The protected time to think and read and research and to have some space from the completely absorbing task of providing patient care. It has been a transformational experience and I am deeply grateful to Mount Sinai Hospital, Akua Yirenkyi, Sioban Nelson, Lianne Jeffs and Lisa Wayment for their support.
