Catherine Koppelman earned her nursing stripes during the Vietnam conflict, developing leadership qualities that have put her on a 24-year ladder of success.

A graduate of St. Vincent Charity Hospital School of Nursing, Koppelman joined the Navy Nurse Corps in 1971, working stateside in the orthopedic and psychiatric units of the Philadelphia Naval Hospital.

"It was a wonderful educational development experience for me," said Koppelman, who worked in acute and critical care departments, learned how to do EKG interpretations and even researched with original catheters. After leaving the Navy, she went back to school on the GI Bill, earning her BA from Cleveland State University and her master's degree at Duke University.

Today, she is responsible for an $80 million budget and 28 inpatient care areas on two campuses of Summa Health Systems, and has implemented successful strategies to recruit and retain nurses on a 1,500-member nursing staff.

Koppelman joined Summa in 1997 and developed a three-year plan to help alleviate the nursing shortage by creating an attractive working environment and by helping raise funds for student scholarships. "We have our own internal scholarship fund and it's huge," Koppelman said. "We've given 50 full-time scholarships to staff members here at Summa who want to become nurses."

She's also worked with Akron public schools to promote health careers in general, participating in career fairs and allowing students to "shadow" nurses and other employees in the hospital setting.

Under her leadership, the institution successfully instituted a campaign in 2002 to recruit and orient 100 nurses in 100 days. She also started a weekend scheduling option for medical, surgical and critical care nurses.

A nursing retention committee was formed to research the best ways to keep nurses at Summa that has resulted in a low 6.5 percent vacancy rate and high marks on nursing satisfaction surveys, Koppelman said.

"We worked hard for a good compensation package, higher salaries for tenured nurses, including bonuses, and flexible scheduling," said Koppelman, adding that the turnover rate is only 8 percent. She said there are a lot of working mothers and other nurses who want to pursue formal education, so the staff can choose between working 12-hour shifts during the week or straight weekends.

In the acute care setting, Koppelman has helped design systems for supporting the effective delivery of patient care. "We re-examined and made changes in the care delivery model for nurses and improved the support system for nurses delivering that care."

To improve continuity of care, she developed "collaborative care groups" where RNs, assisted by LVNs and nursing assistants, focus on coordinating all aspects of care for groups of patients. She says the approach is needed in an age where patients are sicker, yet the average length of stay is four days. "This is a model that reduces the cost of care and gives very good outcomes in a fast-paced acute care environment," Koppelman said. "Nurses feel satisfied about what they're doing for these patients."

She organized a Patient Safety Steering Committee that resulted in a systemwide care delivery assessment that looked at risk and redesigned care processes to reduce adverse outcomes.

By taking an interdisciplinary approach in working with the elderly, for example, hospital utilization has been reduced and clinical outcomes improved, saving the system millions of dollars during the past few years, Koppelman said. "Our philosophy is to manage care more efficiently and to design care models that work."

To improve patient safety, Koppelman developed a new way for hospital staff to report medical errors without fear of being disciplined. The nonpunitive approach encourages nurses to report medical errors or near misses so the incidents can be put into a database and analyzed.

"We want to look at these errors from a system point of view and look for trends, it's not just about a practitioner making a mistake," Koppelman said. "The approach has resulted in medical system changes and improved patient safety outcomes."