As a veteran of emergency care, Gema’s superpower is seeing through the chaos to identify opportunities for improvement. She noticed that while patients with heart attacks and strokes were treated swiftly with established protocols, patients with suspected sepsis—which carries a major risk of death—were not treated in the same urgent, organized fashion. So she created the protocol herself: Gema established a special “sepsis gurney,” where patients could be quickly treated with the sepsis protocol. This has significantly improved sepsis care and patient outcomes.
She also saw that improving the triage process could reduce patient wait times, which, in turn, could reduce stress on patients, staff, and the entire health system. So she came up with a new triage process that streamlined how patients were registered, tracked, and monitored throughout their visit, ensuring that no patient is overlooked. The result has been an impressive reduction in patient wait times to under 60 minutes.
Despite all these remarkable accomplishments, what her colleagues most appreciate about Gema is her open-hearted mentorship of nurses. She makes sure that each new nurse feels supported and valued for their work, and as a leader, she takes the team’s morale seriously. She organizes outings and workshops, building camaraderie and a sense of unity.