Leaders at Martin Luther King Community Healthcare in South Los Angeles definitely had the circumstance: 25 nurses finishing a six-month skin-health education program on best practices and guidance for selecting and using Medline products.

All they needed was the pomp.

As commencement season was starting this spring at preschools, high schools, colleges, medical schools and everywhere in between, MLKCH was converting the cafeteria of its 131-bed hospital into a mini banquet hall to celebrate its newly established Skin Champions with a bona fide graduation ceremony – the idea of Evelyn Narvaez, the hospital’s wound care lead for inpatient care.

“From the outset of the Skin Champion™ program last October, I knew it was important to formally recognize these nurses for the dedication and effort they would be putting into this initiative,” Narvaez said. “They are now a vital resource for our facility, and it was essential that the entire hospital community knows who they are and the valuable role they play.”

Narvaez and Sandra Temple, MLKCH’s senior director of nursing operations, skipped the formality of caps and gowns in their planning, but they and MLKCH arranged for just about everything else: printed invitations for the graduates and leaders across the organization, a stage for each nurse to walk across as their name was announced and certificates signed by Temple and chief nursing officer Edna De Leon, along with thank-you letters and Skin Champion sweatshirts and badges to make the graduates instantly recognizable in the hospital’s hallways. Family and friends filled the audience.

Narvaez and Temple attribute much of that success to Kristin Anderson (right), Medline’s clinical solutions manager for acute care sales. She visited MLKCH in person to help guide the sessions, which were built around 15 of 24 modules in the Skin Champion program and covered a wide range of best practices and guidance for skin care, wound care and pressure-injury prevention using Medline products.

However, because Skin Champion is a “train the trainer” program that explicitly asks for creativity from the organizing clinicians, it was actually Narvaez who did much of the planning and teaching, tailoring modules to MLKCH-specific policies and processes while mixing in her own icebreakers, games and group activities. These included, for example, autumn-themed art activities and a “Casino Night” in which students were quizzed on skin-health topics and scenarios.

Anderson, who has taken the Skin Champion program to numerous facilities across the region, loved seeing all the enthusiasm.

“It’s so rewarding to see customers as engaged and focused on education and outcomes as the MLK group was,” said Anderson, who attended the graduation with Medline colleagues Janice Tierney, MLKCH’s skin health sales representative, and Tiffany Kunich, clinical division sales manager. “These nurses and leaders were empowered to make a difference and lead by example, and they came to each session excited, participated actively and asked insightful questions. They also have MLK’s executive leadership support, which is imperative to keep the program going.”

That support is now stronger than ever. MLKCH initially was drawn to the Skin Champion program because it sought to lower its rate of hospital-acquired pressure injuries (HAPI).

“Since these 25 nurses completed the program, we haven’t just met our goals — we’ve exceeded them,” Temple said. “Most notably, we’ve seen a remarkable decrease in state-reportable HAPI cases at our hospital since the program concluded in April.”

That has led straight into some next steps in skin-health education. In mid-June, MLKCH began using Medline’s Skin Matters™ program for nursing assistants and MHAs, running the modules on its own. A second offering of the Skin Champion program with Anderson is also planned, with so many clinicians interested that there’s a spillover waiting list.

That cohort will start in the fall, giving Narvaez and Temple plenty of time to plan their next graduation ceremony.

“We’ve absolutely seen our return on investment with this program through Medline,” Temple said. “It’s so clear what we’re getting out of it.”

Learn more about the growing trend of “gamification” in educating clinicians, as well as additional programs and resources that Medline offers around skin health.