Q:
What inspired you to become a nurse?
A:
When I was in high school my grandma got really sick with Alzheimer’s and advanced age dementia, and she had to go live in a couple of different nursing homes. I would see the quality of the care that she was getting, and it wasn’t necessarily because of the nurses themselves—I thought that they were all wonderful—but there was just such a shortage of them. And as a result, the patients suffered neglect. I was like, things could be better, people can be really well taken care of. And that was what gave me the push to start thinking about nursing.
Q:
What do you love most about being a nurse?
A:
You develop such a strong bond with people because they put so much trust and faith in you to keep them safe and to be the one guiding them through this whole process. It’s a really huge honor that people allow me to take care of them in that way.
Q:
What do you do as a nurse?
A:
I work primarily in OB/GYN. A lot of my job is doing patient education, hands-on care in terms of vaccinations or perhaps coming into the room to assist with gynecologic procedures. And then in between patients, especially with those bigger cases, I’ll do a lot of telephone triage.
Q:
What’s a typical day like for you as an OBGYN nurse?
A:
When I go to work one of the first responsibilities that I have as a nurse is to do our daily checklists of protocols, make sure that there are no expired supplies on the unit, and make sure that everything is where it should be. We run all the tests.
Then our first patients usually arrive around 7:30. So I will respond to patient emails and calls that have come through for the physicians. We are the first stop before it goes to them so that way we can take care of as much work as is easy to answer, particularly with patient counseling and advice. And then I just kind of bop back and forth between doing that and seeing the patients in the rooms. My shift goes until about 3:00 o’clock.
Q:
What’s your advice for someone just starting out as a nurse?
A:
For someone starting out, you need to absolutely have a very clear focus as to what your goals are. There are so many different opportunities in nursing and in advanced practice nursing that someone could get a little bogged down once they start looking into all the options.
Q:
How do you balance work and life as a nurse?
A:
I try to take at least one day a week to make sure that I’m really dedicating to self-care and allowing that day to be just for myself, to sort of restore.
Pilates is a big thing that I do for myself. It gives me 50 minutes of just complete silence where I’m really one with myself, moving, getting the joints and the blood flowing, and just being centered. Feeling whole.
Q:
Can you share any examples of how you innovate as a nurse?
A:
We were, in my opinion, experiencing an alarming rate of newborn falls. So myself and the assistant nurse manager on the unit decided that we had to do something about it.
We put together this committee that every time a fall would happen, we would go back from the beginning from the moment that the patient walked into the hospital. We would look through the chart, chart the course of the labor, and see what medication she was given. What time did the fall occur? In what setting? Was the patient feeding? Was she sitting down? Was she in her bed? And then we started to put the pieces of the puzzle together.
What that led to is us redesigning our patient beds, particularly on the postpartum unit when falls were more prone to happen. The new beds had four side rails that were completely closed off. So if a mother was to fall asleep while breastfeeding her newborn and the baby happened to fall out of the arms, the baby wasn’t really going to go anywhere.
We also worked with the physicians to space out the amount of time we were giving narcotics to patients—making it every six hours instead of every four, and alternating that with pain relievers. That way they could still get quick pain relief, but not necessarily need to be on those hard-hitting medications.
We actually wrote a protocol that still exists at our hospital that I think others have modeled, which is really an honor.
Q:
Can you describe your volunteer experience as a nurse?
A:
One of the doctors that I work for runs a charity organization that is based in South America and Africa, and my hope is this fall to go on a mission with her. That organization actually teaches physicians and nurses in the country where they are how to basically deliver and do these kind of safe gynecological procedures, or maybe do a safe home birth. Her organization has seen the rates of maternal and infant mortality go down because of what she’s doing. So it’s fantastic.
