Q:
What inspired you to become a nurse?
A:
I just knew that nurses are frontline healthcare providers, and I wanted to do something that would provide direct patient care.
Q:
What do you love most about being a nurse?
A:
What I love most about being a nurse is that I go home feeling great about what I’ve done. To me it’s not just about holding hands or wearing colorful scrubs. It’s about using fast critical thinking skills, listening to your gut, your instinct, and going from there.
Q:
What’s a typical day like for you as a nurse?
A:
I triage calls and take decisions within a rapidly changing environment and provide expert clinician support to the referring facilities. We mobilize as a team as fast as possible to retrieve a patient to provide optimum care. So, most of my job is fast paced, requires very fast critical thinking skills, function autonomously while working with many different teams, while maintaining a professional and courteous conduct.
You come into work early. You have to be there on time. And then you get the shift report from the previous nurse that was taking care of the patient. And you get a full, head-to-toe, their entire history, everything. And then you go check on your patients.
You introduce yourself. You do an initial assessment. See how they are. You check all the medications that they need to be taking, what time, all the side effects, the adverse reactions. Make sure everything is compatible. And then soon after that you round with the interdisciplinary team; with the doctors, the physical therapist, the occupational therapist, make sure that you have a plan for this patient.
Q:
What’s your advice for someone just starting out as a nurse?
A:
If your orientation isn’t enough, speak to the manager, or your preceptor, and ask them for more time.” AnitaUse your time off wisely. Use it to spend time with family, go travel and do things you enjoy. Also use your time off to be involved in activities you enjoy. Do not take work home. Leave work, at work!
Q:
What does it mean to volunteer as a nurse?
A:
I’ve volunteered in Nicaragua as a nurse in a wellness clinic. It was one of the most rewarding experiences. To help and aid those most in need, to provide support, not just medically, but emotionally as well. I saw over 200 patients a day, pediatric and geriatric patients, and provided them with a wellness check and triaged them. They say once you get bit by the medical mission bug, you can’t stop!
Q:
What is your innovation story?
A:
There was this one girl, she just collapsed in school. They brought her into the ER. Turns out that she had an aneurysm in her head. And they clipped off the aneurysm and everything, but she was pretty much in a very comatose state for many, many weeks.
There was this one night shift where she wiggled her index finger, and I wasn’t sure if I saw it or if I was imagining it. Eventually she was blinking, she was turning her head, she was recovering,
That was something that I can’t forget because just being there, day and night at her bedside. I was the first one to catch that initial sort of improvement in her clinical status.
