Three Atlantic Health System emergency departments recently received the Emergency Nurses Association’s 2023 Lantern Award for demonstrating exceptional and innovative leadership, practice, education, advocacy and research performance.
Morristown Medical Center’s Sameth Emergency Department, Overlook Medical Center emergency services at the Union Campus and CentraState Medical Center‘s emergency department were among the record-breaking 53 emergency departments that received the award for the 2023 cycle. The award is given in three-year cycles.
The Morristown Medical Center, Overlook Medical Center Union ED and CentraState Medical Center Lantern Awards will be on display in their respective emergency departments. As a recipient, the hospitals will be recognized in upcoming ENA publications, on the ENA website and during Emergency Nursing 2023, the association’s annual conference Sept. 21-23 in San Diego.
This year’s recipients are spread across the U.S. and across the globe, with an emergency department in the United Arab Emirates receiving the award for the second time.
This is the fifth consecutive time Overlook’s Union ED has won the award, making Union the only emergency department internationally to receive the award in five consecutive cycles since the award’s inception in 2011.
The Union ED is the anchor for Overlook’s Union Campus, a multispecialty medical complex developed by Atlantic Health System. The 20-bed emergency department has about 40,000 visits each year and provides 24/7 care, including emergency and advanced cardiovascular care, comprehensive stroke care, on-site laboratory services, on-site radiology services and referrals to community outreach.
Some highlights from the Union ED Lantern Award application included multidisciplinary teamwork and collaboration by physicians and nurses, improved time from patient arrival to departure, efforts to reduce opioid-related events, a robust reward and recognition program and initiating performance improvement initiatives focused on safety.
The Sameth Emergency Department marks its second time winning the award, highlighting the accomplishments of this state-of-the-art department, which provided care to more than 104,000 members of the community in 2022. The ACEP-accredited Level 1 Geriatric ED is part of Morristown Medical Center, a 735-bed, Magnet-designated, Level 1 ACS Trauma Center. The ED at Morristown Medical Center maintains residencies in emergency medicine, nursing and pharmacy, continually striving to provide exemplary education to the next generation of care providers.
In its application, the Sameth ED team highlighted initiatives including nurse-driven orders and leveraging technology to reduce door to electrocardiogram time; a multidisciplinary patient flow team, which moved the provider forward to reduce wait times through intake areas; COVID-19 pandemic responses including innovative provision of patient care, virtual family presence and staff support groups; disaster and emergency preparedness training events; along with a myriad of patient safety initiatives.
CentraState Medical Center’s emergency department, which won the award for the first time this year, treated more than 48,000 patients during the last year.
One of the many achievements highlighted in CentraState’s application involved CentraState’s emergency department nurses, who were instrumental in assisting to develop services and facilities to address the unmet need for advanced cardiac services, including a high-tech cardiac catheterization lab and ST-elevation myocardial infarction care to help save lives and meet standards of care.
