Measuring Capacity to Care Using Nursing Data

Cherrie Lowe is a registered nurse, midwife, an innovator and business manager, who brings local, national and international health service executive management, research, software development and system implementation experiences. Her health industry experience includes past roles as a Nurse Educator, Quality Manager, Director of Nursing, Director of Clinical Services, hospital accreditation surveyor and medico-legal expert witness. As Director of Clinical Services for Ramsay Health Care she played a major role in managing the transition of a large Commonwealth funded veteran hospital to Australia’s largest private hospital where she developed a strong, efficient and dynamic nursing service and allied health team. Cherrie assisted in the expansion of clinical services, including: Cardiac, Gynaecology and Neurosurgery. She again achieved the ACHS Quality Award for large hospitals and the hospital was also awarded the Employer of the Year Award for large organizations in Brisbane.

During her years as a nurse executive, Cherrie managed her family, undertook her post graduate studies as an external student, was a surveyor for the Australian Health Care Council, developed, tested andmade use of a patient acuity system, and undertook various consultancies. She partnered in business with a software developer and her system was fully computerized taking advantage of ongoing technical developments. Cherrie shared her research findings with other Directors of Nursing who then worked with her by facilitating ongoing research and development activities in their facilities. This research was presented at a world informatics conference in San Antonio in 1994. During the mid 1990s both Cherrie’s and Evelyn’s patient acuity systems were used by numerous Queensland hospitals. The Queensland Government funded a validation study enabling a comparison to be made between these two systems using the same patient populations which validated both systems, as the use of their systems provided comparable results. The success of Cherrie’s automated and highly interoperable TrendCare system led her to assume the CEO, researcher and developer role on a full-time basis. Her primary focus has always been to take on the many ensuing challenges to benefit the nursing and midwifery professions As recognition Cherrie received a Nursing Excellence award from the Royal College of Nursing for her contribution to nursing in Australia. Developing and continuously improving the reliability of an evidence based patient acuity and workload management system for nursing and midwifery has been a challenging undertaking, and during the past 25 years Cherrie has had to overcome many barriers. These include (1) convincing nursing and midwifery leaders, colleges and unions that nursing services need to collect and present their own evidence of nursing demand in order for nursing services to be adequately resourced, (2) convincing health service senior executives, including CEO’s, finance managers and chief information officers of the methodologies that are best suited to measuring nursing demand and the value of nursing demand measurements for effective budget management and accurate costings of episodes of care, (3) Convincing nurses and midwives generally of the importance of collecting nursing and midwifery data so that safe staffing and fair workloads can be a reality. These barriers have been overcome in some countries but are still ongoing in others. Developing a viable small business, while trying to provide an affordable software product to health services that are financially stretched, has tested Cherrie’s business skills. Transforming a small local business to an international business with a customer footprint across six countries in the health care environment is testament to her determination, commitment and sound business strategies.