Tanner Medical Center's ICU Organizational Assessment
Scott Willard Franklin
The University of Alabama
Capstone College of Nursing
NUR 522: Organizational Assessments for Clinical Nurse Leaders
Fall, 2010

Tanner Medical Center's ICU Organizational Assessment
Tanner Health System is a nonprofit regional health system serving a nine county area of West Georgia and East Alabama. Tanner facilities include: a 202-bed acute care Tanner Medical Center/Carrollton, a 40-bed acute care Tanner Medical Center/Villa Rica, a 25-bed critical access Higgins General Hospital in Bremen, and a 52-bed behavioral health facility Willow Brooke in Villa Rica (Retrieved from http://www.tanner.org) The micro system that I am going to describe consists of the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) located in Carrollton, Georgia. The purpose of this paper is to describe the current microsystem in the ICU and how Clinical Nurse Leader can help the ICU can run more efficiently.
The critical care department is composed of a joint eight bed intensive care unit (ICU) and a four bed coronary care unit (CCU) in a horse shoe design. Because Tanner’s provides highly complex medical care requiring precision, synchronization, and coordination of multiple services and personnel, the ICU functions as a closed unit that is self sufficiently ran. Because we are a closed unit, our nursing staff is required to take 36 hours of call every 6 weeks and work every other weekend. The nurse to patient ratio is 2:1. Patients that require more intense focused care have a 1:1 nurse to patient ratio. Illnesses requiring such a ratio include: patients placed on an Intra-aortic Balloon Pump (IABP), Continuous Renal Replacement Therapy (CRRT), induced hypothermia and suicidal or overdosed patients. Tanner also uses charge nurses to help provide extra care and support to staff, patients and families to help promote