Bayhealth is committed to nursing excellence, which is why Patient Care Services works via a Professional Practice Model and Shared Governance structure that serve as a foundation for practice across Bayhealth. These structures elevate nursing's decision-making ability and drive to improve patient care.
Professional practice model
An organization’s professional practice model is a framework for professional nursing and serves as a foundation for practice across all settings of a healthcare organization. Bayhealth’s professional practice model signifies what the nursing staff stands for, which is to be grounded in research and evidence-based practice. With a design driven by frontline staff, the model ties in Bayhealth’s core values – compassion, accountability, respect, integrity, and teamwork – with who we are as a nursing service.
- Patient- and family-centered care remains at the core of the model.
- Nurses continue to embrace Planetree’s philosophy of treating the whole patient – mind, body and spirit.
- The values align with Bayhealth’s core values of compassion, accountability, respect, integrity, and teamwork.
- Nursing work is grounded in research and evidence-based practice.
- Through advocacy, empowerment and collaboration, nursing excellence is achieved.
Shared Governance
Bayhealth empowers nurses to practice autonomously and to be actively engage in decision-making groups and processes. Nurses at all levels have the opportunity to participate in shared governance councils, committees, and tasks forces that make decisions about nursing practice and patient care.
Bayhealth supports shared leadership, participative decisions making, and nursing autonomy through implemented structures and processes. The Shared Governance structure, at both the divisional and unit levels, demonstrates an organized model of empowerment for decision making by direct-care nurses. Nurses at all levels can serve as leaders of the councils, projects, or groups that support the council’s goals and objectives.