Maxim Healthcare Services is offering its nurses a new online Training program through a partnership with Johns Hopkins School of Nursing.
Columbia, Maryland-based Maxim provides home health care, health care staffing, behavioral care and population health and wellness services. The company operates more than 260 offices around the U.S., 183 of which are focused on in-home care services.
The online program, which is specific for the management of home mechanical ventilation (HMV) patients, is a one-hour course that Maxim’s nurses can take to supplement their current training and knowledge. Nurses can take it as often as they want with no cost, and will be required to do the training on an annual basis and undergo the company’s annual, in-person assessment.
“We have a population of technology-dependent patients; they are dependent on ventilators,” Cheryl Nelson, senior vice president of clinical operations for Maxim, told Home Health Care News. “We want to make sure the nurse is the most confident and competent at the bedside in the home. These are probably one of our most complex set of patients, a very high-risk population that we take care of.”
While only an hour-long training, the program offers simulations for nurses to select answers for interventions based on real-life scenarios with the patient group.
“It is really focused on the emergency management of the tracheotomy and ventilator patients,” Nelson said. “We give a robust simulation within that module that starts with basic scenarios that a nurse may experience, and goes to the most complex scenarios where the patient is rapidly deteriorating in front of them. We time them on interventions and see how many interventions are done. It’s as comprehensive as possible without it being in a real-life scenario.”
Nurses can take the program over and over because they can select different interventions. That practice can help prepare nurses for a real-life situation, Nelson said.
The program was developed in partnership with Johns Hopkins’s nursing departments and subject matter experts from Maxim. This is the first such partnership for Maxim, though the provider has relationships with nursing schools for clinical rotations with students and recruiting outreach all over the country, according to Nelson.
The additional training could also help with nursing retention, a widespread challenge across the in-home care space. However, that result would be a “secondary benefit” for the aims of the program, Nelson said.
The online training is available to nurses at Maxim who are also interested in expanding their skills, in addition to those who take care of ventilator patients.
Written by Amy Baxter
