Outstanding Scholar: Jarick Huliganga

Jarick Huliganga, MN, RN, CPAN (BSN ’04, MN ’20) was awarded the 2020 Outstanding Scholar Award for his translation of academic work into a hospital-wide QI project that is focused on improving patient safety and public health outcome. Jarick directed his academic work on the Nursing Professional Development (NPD) specialty. Through his scholarly activities, he showed that NPD specialists are champions for practice-based scientific inquiry. He utilized proven evidence-based methods and principles to guide his approach to facilitating and managing a quality improvement initiative for his fieldwork at Kaiser Permanente. Jarick adopted the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) approach to quality improvement (IHI-QI) and the Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) model as the guiding framework. The goal of this very important project he spearheaded was to improve patient handoff in order to enhance patient safety and increase nurse satisfaction. In collaboration with the unit personnel he developed a standardized patient handoff tool with educational training for staff in the perioperative department at Kaiser’s Central Hospital Surgery Center. This tool was rolled out but follow-up evaluations were halted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Previous award recipients are as follows: Susan Collins (2019) and Arlyce Coumar (2018).