Bold Voices in Progressive Care: Using Shared Decision Making to Implement Evidence-Based Practice in Progressive Care

Progressive care units (PCUs) are recognized as an effective strategy for providing safe and cost-effective care to a large number of patients with ever-increasing acuity.¹ Institutions have developed PCUs to reduce transfers of patients between units, promote the effective use of intensive care unit (ICU) beds, and meet the monitoring and specialty nursing needs of the more acutely ill patients.^1,2 The rapid increase in numbers of these PCUs, however, has not been accompanied by establishment of consistent patterns of clinical practice and care delivery unique to this practice environment.³ There was an opportunity to promote consistent clinical practice patterns in our institution, which has 7 distinct PCUs called intermediate care areas (Table 1). At our institution, the titles of the relevant committee and Web site are being changed from intermediate care to PCU terminology. For clarity in this article, the term PCU is used. In...