Waveny Care Center Using Sim Center for Nursing Staff Training

Waveny Care Center – a Waveny LifeCare Network skilled nursing and short-term rehab facility – partnered with the of the Norwalk Community College’s (NCC) Nursing and Allied Health Simulation Center to provide hands-on simulation training for its nurses who care for Waveny’s short-term rehab patients.

The “Waveny Care Center Assessment Training Collaboration for Healthcare Serving the Community” (WATCH) training program was developed by Mary Di Paola, RN, Waveny’s Director of Nursing and Cathleen Caulfield, RN, MSN, MS, CHSE, NCC’s Simulation Center Coordinator to enhance Waveny’s clinical team’s ability to proactively recognize, assess and respond to challenges posed by diagnoses like CHF, COPD, Pneumonia, Post Myocardial Infarction and Urinary Tract Infection.

“Today, the medical care needs of patients discharged from local hospitals to Waveny Care Center for inpatient care are vastly more acute than they were just a few years ago,” said Di Paola.  She says many of the joint replacement cases who used to come to the Care Center as short-term rehab patients are now going directly home with homecare services. Now the center gets patients who require greater care due to complex co-morbidities in its inpatient rehabilitation, she says, making it crucial for Waveny’s nursing team to be prepared to care for them with early identification, communication and interventions to reduce complications and the need for hospital readmission.