Published May 15, 2025
Nursing Professional Governance (NPG) at Westerly Hospital is in the midst of what you might call a renaissance.
The hospital’s small NPG team was dormant during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, but a core group of nurses is now determined to play a more active role in Yale New Haven Health’s overall NPG structure.
NPG is a systemwide construct that allows bedside nurses to share ideas that, once vetted and analyzed, can potentially become the new standard of care across the entire health system. NPG is designed to give frontline nurses a say in leadership decisions and, for that reason, the Westerly team is excited to become more visible and influential.
“NPG helps give all nurses a voice in decisions that affect themselves, their practice and their patients,” said Ashley Napolitano, RN, an ICU nurse and co-chair of the Westerly NPG Council. “Working collaboratively with management and our other delivery networks, we can take ideas and practices from our larger hospitals and bring them to our smaller community hospital, and we believe this can make a big difference here.”
The engagement of the Westerly team is drawing plenty of support from leadership.
“It is always exciting to see our frontline nurses engaged in the advancement of care for our patients,” said Shannon Christian, RN, chief nursing officer, L+M and Westerly hospitals. “The Westerly NPG team is such a talented group, and to see them interacting with colleagues across the health system through NPG is inspirational. Big ideas can come from little hospitals, too, so having the Westerly team playing an active role in NPG is not only good for Westerly, it’s good for Yale New Haven Health.”
As one small example, the Westerly NPG team is investigating how other delivery networks manage reading vital signs for post-operative patients after they arrive on medical-surgical units. At Westerly Hospital, nurses continue checking vitals every 15 minutes for an additional two hours. The NPG council wants to investigate whether this is considered helpful, or if it’s an unnecessary disruption for patients and a burden on nurses’ valuable time.
“If someone questions something, we do the research and talk to all the delivery networks to see what they’re doing,” said Jessica Beardsley, RN, an Emergency Department nurse and NPG council co-chair.
Theoretically, a local practice such as checking vital signs more frequently could be adopted systemwide if it were proven to be a best practice. “That’s where this council comes in,” said Lauren Rigo, RN, a council member and nurse in Westerly’s Ambulatory Care Unit. “A nurse at the bedside raised this question about vital signs, demonstrating a questioning attitude. It’s exactly the kind of thing that makes NPG an effective tool for all our nurses at the bedside.”
