I started out in Junior High School as a Candy Striper, years ago, very interested in nursing. My first job in nursing was pediatric nursing and then I moved to geriatric nursing and went to work for home care.
In that role I became interested in administration. Then I became a vice president of nursing in north Mississippi and then moved into the chief nursing officer role and then, as the hospital grew, I moved into a chief nursing executive position where I was over nursing for all 6 hospitals.
During my tenure with that hospital in Mississippi we highly focused on quality, we focused on magnet for nursing and before I left that organization we were a two time Malcom Baldrich award winner.
I moved from Mississippi to San Antonio, Texas and became a chief nursing executive of an eight hospital system there. About 18 months ago, I was recruited to Augusta to work here as the Chief Nursing Officer. It's my first time to work as a Chief Nursing Officer for a teaching facility. It's very different but very challenging and exciting.
In total, I've had 40 years of nursing and healthcare experience. I think the aspect that I'm bringing to this organization is to really elevate nursing to be a full partner with the physicians as we advance healthcare.
There's students everywhere, there's young people learning and growing and developing so it's an exciting atmosphere for people. There's new nurses here, the College of Nursing has 850 nursing students.
There's respiratory therapy students, physical therapy students so it's a good environment to see young people growing and developing. Well, I would say this is the best place anywhere in the region to work especially for nursing.
There's many good things going on in our organization for nursing. One is we're being to navigate the magnet journey, which is the gold standard for nursing. It's the focus on enhancing the professional practice of nursing.
We have a shared governance model here, in that nurses from the bedside develop counsels and that's where the clinical decision making is made- from the bedside nurses.
We are also focusing on our nurses furthering their education. We're very flexible with nurses with their scheduling so they can return to school. We focus on our nurses on becoming specialty certified.
There's research that shows the more nurses that you have that are specialty certified, the more your nurses further their education, it's directly linked with enhanced quality for the patients.
We're providing on site certification review courses so our nurses don't have to leave the area to take the review courses so they can sit for the certification exams.
As I've mentioned, we're really working on the culture with physicians, really collaborating and partnering with the physicians and the physicians are very interested and excited about elevating the workplace.
It's a, as I call it, it's a "just" culture here, it's a safe culture, where you can speak up if there's things that are not going well that we need to focus on.
We're continuously focusing on quality improvement, performance improvement, and nurses at the bedside are on all of these counsels and involved in improving our care for our patients.
For new nurses, this would be the place that you would want to come to work because we're a teaching facility. As a new nurse, you start out as a novice and we know that there's much more that you need to learn.
So we have an excellent nurse residency program with mentorship, with preceptorship and it's really base upon the new nurses level of onfidence in their role. We have a great simulation lab that we can use. So a good place to get started as a new nurse, but also opportunity to get involved in shared governance, to get involved in quality committees, ways that you can start out as a nurse leader even at the bedside.
For the experienced nurse, this is a great place to work. The complexities of patients that we have here. The rare diseases that we see with all of the specialists that we, it's just amazing the kind of care that's given to the patients here.
So you're continuing to learn at what ever level you are at your nursing career. It's the opportunity to keep the nurse at the bedside but where they can advance to higher levels.
There's also monetary advancement with each of those levels. We have a four-level nurse clinical ladder. We utilize team-nursing here, partnering with a nurse with a patient care tech to take care of our patients.
So we're focusing on enhancing the knowledge base of all of the disciplines that are at the bedside to take care of the patients.