PBN Health Care Heroes 2024
Health Care Administrator – Emergency Services: BETHANY GINGERELLA
Westerly Hospital Emergency Department nurse manager
What led you to choose health care as your profession? In my first year of college, I became friends with individuals who volunteered for our local ambulance service, which I later ended up joining. This certainly was the start of my passion for emergency medicine. I spent many hours in the neonatal intensive care unit and was impressed with all the nurses did to care for the newborns. It was witnessing the caring, loving and quality of care provided in the NICU that solidified the fact that I wanted to be a nurse.
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How have you helped boost the quality of or access to health care? I have participated in national quality improvement metrics to improve pediatric readiness at our community hospital to local institutional training geared to boosting the quality of care offered to pediatric patients who present to community hospital emergency departments for care. Most recently, in light of emergency department overcrowding post COVID-19, I have done a lot of interdisciplinary work with my colleagues to safely shorten the length of emergency department visits while still providing high-quality care to the patients we serve. Our department’s recent focus was working on driving down the amount of time it took us to get our admitted patients out of the emergency department and into their admission bed. With the help of an interdisciplinary team with the hospital, we put steps in place that decreased the length of stay in the emergency department by 58%.
What more do you feel the state can do to help further support the health care sector in Rhode Island? The state has work to do on reimbursement rates across the health care system. Low reimbursement rates are hindering access and the sustainability of health care delivery here.
