The Salus Luminare award honors team members who “shine the light on safety,” and it is a part of ECU Health’s mission to create safe working environments, both physically and psychologically. This year, Tim Barnes, clinical manager of ECU Health Medical Center’s Radiation Oncology, Kenneth Gregory, nurse practitioner at Heritage Emergency Physicians in Edgecombe and Sheena Bunch, staff nurse III with Radiology at ECU Health Beaufort Hospital, were recognized during the Nov. 18 ECU Health and ECU Health Medical Center Quality Improvement Committee of the Board meeting as award recipients.
Tim Barnes
Being a registered technologist in Radiation Therapy was not Tim Barnes’ first career.
“I started off in law enforcement in Wilson,” Tim shared. “I was a homicide detective for seven years and a patrol officer three years before that.”
However, Tim said a lot of his work in law enforcement informs the work he does today.
“It’s a big jump, but there is a lot of overlap,” he said. “They both revolve around doing things safely and paying attention to details. Radiation therapy is high risk and requires a great deal of care.”
One of those details was an observation Tim made about weekend emergency radiation treatments.
“We have a rotational on-call schedule for emergency weekend treatments, and there was just one therapist on call for a weekend,” he said. “During weekdays, however, the normal process involves at least two therapists for each treatment because there are a lot of steps.”
With such complexity, Tim wondered – why weren’t they using two therapists on weekends?
“This didn’t make sense to me, and when I became the lead therapist, I made a policy change stipulating that weekend emergency treatments required two on-call therapists, as well as a physicist.”
Tim also implemented the Good Catch program, a near-miss safety reporting system.
“I wrote an article for the American Society of Radiologic Technologists (ASRT) magazine about incident reports,” he said. “I attended a presentation by Larry Marks, the Radiation Oncology chair at The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. They were developing a proactive reporting system known as the ‘Good Catch’ system, designed to learn from near misses and share how incidents were prevented. I wanted to implement a program like that here at our hospital.”
This innovation in safety reporting encourages team members to talk about what they do to prevent safety incidents from happening on a daily basis. Tim met with his team to explain the new reporting system but he said it took three years to get the team fully entrenched.
“I had to show them it was a way to make the department safer, not a tattletale system,” he said. “It took communication, and not just one day. Every month I met with the team to go through every single Good Catch, so they knew each one was being seen and discussed. Once it caught on and our department and the doctors were engaged, it became the culture of our department.”
Now, the program is system-wide, but Tim doesn’t want to stop there.
“I want to spread this beyond the system, so I’ve shared this at the National Commission on Quality Reporting (NCOG) in Charlotte for quality and safety improvement for radiation oncology clinics. With similar programs at other clinics, we can learn from each other.”
Tim said he’s humbled to win the Salus Luminare award.
“I didn’t go into this for me,” he said. “I did it because I saw a way we could treat patients safer. But I didn’t do it alone. I was at the forefront of the idea and introduced it to the department, but it took the team to get on board to make it happen. I share this award with them.”
A culture of safety and excellence
While three team members were named winners of the Salus Luminare aware, 56 team members were nominated, demonstrating ECU Health’s ongoing prioritization, implementation and recognition of safe patient practices.