Tricia Allen: A Pioneering Nurse Leader Who Teaches Others to Fly
Summary
Allen, far left in the photo above, was recently recognized with an Outset Medical Pioneer Award for her dedication to improving patient lives and the patient care of her own and other nursing teams across the AdventHealth system, with the Tablo® Hemodialysis System.
Tricia Allen, BSN, RN, CDN, CNML, Assistant Nurse Manager at AdventHealth Ocala in Ocala, FL, has set an inspirational example over her 30-year career. She is a passionate advocate for the culture of nursing teamwork and collaboration within the AdventHealth system, and is known for always finding a way to help others. Her generous spirit has come into play over the past three years, in leading the conversion of eight acute dialysis programs across Florida from outsourced to insourced hemodialysis services with Tablo. In appreciation of these efforts, she and her team recently received the prestigious Outset Medical Pioneer Award, envisioned by Outset’s Chair and CEO Leslie Trigg, to honor their dedication to changing the status quo in dialysis and improving patient lives.
One day this past October, Allen thought she was attending a lunch event in appreciation of her team’s collaboration with AdventHealth and non-Advent Health entities to educate nursing staff about the successful Tablo dialysis program at Ocala, but she was in for a surprise. She and her team were presented with the Pioneer Award, given previously to only two other hospital teams.
“I thought the award was very, very nice and we really appreciated being selected to receive it. We’re going to proudly display our framed certificates in our dialysis unit,” says Allen. “My experience with bringing Tablo in-house at Ocala and helping other campuses with their implementations has been supported by the ease of training and use of the machine. And that has probably been the most ‘aha’ thing that has come out of our conversions—that it’s not difficult. This is the way dialysis is meant to be.”
Allen, who recently earned her certified dialysis nurse (CDN) accreditation and is working with her nursing team so they can do the same to recognize their expertise in the field of dialysis, took a leap of faith when she agreed to lead the launch of in-house dialysis service lines across the AdventHealth network in Florida. She is now the go-to person for Tablo conversions across the health system.
“I’m proud of this success and couldn’t have done it without my team. We are truly the experts, having done over 8,000 treatments with Tablo,” she says. “We have also helped to maximize the full clinical capabilities of the technology, from intermittent hemodialysis [IHD] to supporting SLED [sustained low-efficiency dialysis] treatments in the ICU, using Tablo with PRO+*, that has driven clinical outcomes and real financial savings. It’s been proven that every campus has had a return on investment.”
She says that the technology innovation and the ease of use built into Tablo has made her success possible. “I would like to think that we’re setting the standard high for dialysis across the healthcare industry, to make the experience better than it’s ever been for providers and for patients.”
A Leap of Faith
Allen says that her pioneering, driven spirit to succeed and make dialysis better for patients who need it was inspired by two leaders who helped her believe in herself.
“Imee Unto-Dahl [DNP, RN, CENP], who is VP, CNO and COO at AdventHealth Lake Wales, and Trish Price [DNP, RN, NE-BC], Vice President CNO at AdventHealth Ocala, were the two that first approached me about converting AdventHealth Ocala’s outsourced dialysis services to in-house with Tablo,” says Allen. “I was the manager of one of the Med Surg Units at the time, and quickly realized that the new project was going to take more of my time than I could devote to it, to do it the right way. And I’m a 100% girl, not a 50% girl. I met with both of them and said we’ll have to find a supervisor to manage the conversion and build the program. They then said to me, ‘why don’t you become the supervisor?’. I said I can’t do that because I’m not a hemodialysis nurse, I’m a peritoneal dialysis and a Med Surg nurse manager. They both said ‘no, you can do this.’”
Allen says she didn’t initially have faith in herself that she could take on the project, that first appeared daunting, but Unto-Dahl and Price helped her to believe in her capabilities and push beyond her fear of failure.
“They told me, we have every faith in the world that you can figure it out and build a great team,” she says. “I went home and talked to my husband and decided to take the leap. I quickly realized that it was not as daunting as I thought it was going to be. I thought, I can do this. I’m so grateful they believed in me because I absolutely love this role. In my 30 years, this is probably my favorite role that I’ve had, and I’ve done a lot of things.”
Autonomy, and a Mentor Asks for Help
Allen says that the ease of use and staff training with Tablo has given her the autonomy to build out and grow an in-house dialysis program that is considered a model among the AdventHealth system, and other non-AdventHealth facilities as well. And, due to her successes, Allen recently had the chance to pay it forward.
Earlier this year, Unto-Dahl reached out to Allen to ask how the AdventHealth Ocala Tablo dialysis program is going. “I said great, and she said, ‘Good, because I know you’ve helped other campuses, can you help us too,’” says Allen. “She told me they had been given 30 days’ notice by their contracted dialysis provider and needed to figure out their options. I connected her very quickly with the Outset team, and I think she knew right away that an in-house Tablo program was the way to go for AdventHealth Lake Wales, in a conversion that also included its sister campus AdventHealth Heart of Florida.”
Allen met with hospital stakeholders, and then confidently helped Unto-Dahl and her team prepare for their conversion and go-live.
“At that point, I had helped five or six campuses convert, so we had already built the wheel, so to speak,” she says. “She [Unto-Dahl] also knew my work ethic, and that I wasn’t going to sell her something that I didn’t think would work. We stood up their busy two-campus program in 27 days from the time she called me.”
Allen spent two weeks at AdventHealth Lake Wales when they went live in early May with Tablo for IHD. “I did treatments, set up supply chain and helped precept and mentor the nurses and nephrologists, and get them prepared to fly on their own. We thought out of the box and borrowed nurses from other AdventHealth campuses, and also trained emergency department and ICU nurses to support the launch. It was a smooth transition, and they’re doing great now.”
She notes that because she had trained her team at Ocala to be autonomous, she could be away for the two weeks at AdventHealth Lake Wales. “Trish Price, my CNO, wholeheartedly approved of me to go help Unto-Dahl’s team.”
Inspiring Consistency and Interest in Dialysis from Across Nursing
Allen’s secret to her successful Tablo conversions has been standardizing and organizing all the policy and procedure instructions, and providing them in a binder to each hospital team. “We should all be doing things similarly, so I’ve shared all of my policies and everything, and they just adapt them for their campus. I’ve been trying to give dialysis supervisors all the tools they need, so they can be the go-to people at their facilities. I meet with them monthly also so we can share knowledge, as this has definitely been a team effort. Consistency has made things a lot easier for these other campuses to convert, along with the ease of use with Tablo,” she says.
Along the way and in her own humble, non-egotistical fashion, Allen has created a buzz at AdventHealth, and has become known for helping to boost interest in dialysis. She has inspired nurses from across the network to learn dialysis as a new skill—many of whom were working bedside but wanted to transition their careers to a more procedure-based position. Allen has also encountered resistance from those who believe only very experienced dialysis nurses can successfully bring a program in-house.
“At every campus, I’ve told the teams to not have preconceived ideas that you have to find nurses that have worked in dialysis. You don’t have to, I’ve proven it,” she says. “I was not a dialysis nurse and I know everything I need to know about being a dialysis nurse now, and I have certification. I would say out of my eight Tablo conversions, 30% of nurses were already dialysis nurses, 70% were not. If you have the right people, you can do anything.”
“The landscape in dialysis I would say has changed, at least in the hospitals that have Tablo,” she says. “You have nurses with varying backgrounds jumping into this role, and then within a few weeks being competent to do dialysis treatments. This also goes for critical care, as AdventHealth Ocala was the first AdventHealth campus to implement SLED in the ICU. Other campuses outside our state are asking me for advice on conversions too.”
(Photo at the top of the page—Left to right: Tricia Allen, RN, Melvin Seek, MD, and Fia Miller, Market Director, Outset Medical, with a Tablo console at the Pioneer Award celebration at AdventHealth Ocala, October 2023.)
* PRO+ is an optional upgrade to Tablo that enables treatment duration greater than 12 hours and up to 24 hours, and dialysate flow rate down to 50 mL/min.
About AdventHealth
With a sacred mission of Extending the Healing Ministry of Christ, AdventHealth is a connected system of care for every stage of life and health. More than 90,000 team members across hundreds of care sites including physician practices, hospitals, outpatient clinics, home health agencies and hospice centers provide individualized, wholistic care. A shared vision, common values, focus on whole-person health and commitment to making communities healthier unify the system’s more than 50 hospital campuses in diverse markets throughout nine states.
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The views and opinions expressed herein represent the personal opinions of the facility staff, and do not represent the views or opinions of other persons, institutions or organizations.