Ms. JoAnn Hager MSN, RN, CWOCN

I have been a CWOCN since 2003. Finding innovative ways to educate nurses on difficult stomas can be a challenge. Our Colon-Rectal floor has some great nurses, but still are intimidated by challenging stomas. This project started with our local St. Louis Affiliate WOCN conference focused on ostomy and continence. I was asked to do a hands on experience for the attendees. I learned to sew as a little girl and to this day usually have a quilt in the quilting frame for hand quilting. Using my sewing background, I created stoma models from foam, quilt batting and made stomas out of red felt. I was able to make stomas in creases, folds, herniated, end stomas, loop stomas, fistulas in wounds, etc. My imagination went wild…I used buttons for belly buttons, staples for the incision, and created open wounds by cutting the foam and then painting. I even created stomas you could do a mini endoscopy on that went from a dead stoma to a viable stoma. I created over 18 models and obtained pouch samples from the vendors. With each model was a case scenario with multiple pouching options, some correct, some incorrect. The attendees had great reviews for the session. Afterwards, I am wondering, what am I going to do with all the models I spent a lot of time creating. I came up with the idea of creating teaching boards with “Stoma of the Month” for the colon-rectal floor. Each board has one of the models with the case scenario and the pouching options available in our hospital. The management and staff have come to look forward to the new one each month. Some of the more seasoned staff have become involved as well. I have given them the model and the scenario and they have created the board for the month. They had to do the research on the scenario with the disease process and then describe the correct pouching option. The ones that have done boards have said, “it was a bit of work, but I learned a lot”. The boards are now rotating through other nursing divisions where appropriate based on their patient population.