LGH nurses get their metric on

Registered Nurses Kathleen Bird and Adrienne Jones are Lions Gate Hospital metric masters. Kathleen and Adrienne are the winners of the recent Metric Madness contest. Kathleen won a $25 coffee card and Adrienne a bag of coffee for pledging to measure and record in kilograms and correctly guessing how many kilograms in a standard bag of coffee.

“I have heard of cases where weights have been misreported in pounds instead of kilograms,” says Kathleen. “It is important to stay metric to protect our patients.”

Nadine Jones, Practice Initiative Lead at LGH, launched the Metric Madness campaign in early September to create awareness of some of the problems that using two systems can cause and promote the use of metric when communicating weight and height.

Another challenge of the campaign was to create a slogan to help staff remember to always think metric. The winning entry was: Make Metric Your Safety Measure, from Jody Sydor Jones, Coastal Director, Clinical Quality and Patient Safety.

“We don’t often stop to think about how important a small thing like a unit of measurement is,” says Jody. “’Think Metric’ is an important reminder to all of us of the benefit of standardization. We should all be using one system, for the safety of all of our patients and clients.”