From Staff Nurse to CEO

Regina Cunningham, PhD, RN, NEA-BC, FAAN, and Kevin Sowers, MSN, RN, FAAN, both started their nursing careers as staff oncology nurses. Today, Cunningham is chief executive officer of the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia; Sowers is president of the Johns Hopkins Health System and executive vice president of Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland.

As they told AJN in our May Profiles article, neither necessarily envisioned themselves as high-level leaders. So how did they get to where they are today, and what can fellow nurses learn from their experiences?

TAKING CHANCES

After getting a master’s degree in nursing administration, and while earning a doctorate, Cunningham (photo at right) worked her way into progressively larger leadership roles within oncology nursing. Her experiences as a nurse manager and a nursing director led her to become the chief nursing officer at a New Jersey cancer center. Then, after serving as senior director for cancer nursing at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City, she worked in nursing leadership at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.

It was there, when the hospital’s chief nurse retired, that Cunningham took a chance she wasn’t sure about by applying for the […]

2018-05-10T14:55:24-04:00May 9th, 2018|nursing career|1 Comment
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Are You a Nurse Thinking About Retirement?

There are many ways to retire.

According to figures from the ANA, over 500,000 nurses are expected to retire by 2022. That’s a lot of experience exiting the workforce. But, if many of them are like my friends and colleagues, they may “fail retirement,” as one friend put it—she went back to work part-time. Another colleague seems busier than ever and continues to contribute to nursing through writing, teaching, and mentoring. And another said she wanted to do something entirely different, so she works part-time as a realtor and renovates houses. I know many who support their children’s careers by babysitting almost full time. But many don’t think about or prepare for this major change.

A potentially abrupt transition.

The fact is, nursing is an intense profession—whether working in a hospital or community setting or teaching. Most of us are fervent multitaskers, involved in several projects at once. To abruptly move from a fast-paced role to having nothing to do is not an easy transition for many of us.

With our April issue, we debuted a new column called Transitions, aimed at nurses who may be thinking about the next step in their careers and when to leave their present position, either retiring completely or “slowing down.” The new column provides a nice balance to […]

2018-05-02T06:53:14-04:00May 2nd, 2018|Nursing, nursing career|0 Comments
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When Clinical Nursing Students Are Bullied by Staff Nurses

A disillusioning experience.

In this month’s Viewpoint column, clinical nurse instructor John Burkley describes a disturbing incident in which his clinical nursing students were treated with dismissiveness and rudeness by a nurse on a unit to which they’d been assigned. The students ultimately left this early encounter with hospital nursing—which took place at a teaching hospital—with varying degrees of disillusionment.

Nurses may need to develop a certain inner resilience to handle the physical, emotional, moral, intellectual, and organizational challenges of their profession. But bullying won’t help them develop it.

Alienating future nurses does lasting harm. What can be done?

As Burkley notes, negative clinical experiences can have a formative influence on aspiring nurses—they “are alienating, contribute negatively to learning, and should not be tolerated.”

Unfortunately, while many nurses are welcoming and supportive of clinical students, such incidents of subtle or overt bullying appear to be common. Drawing on his own experience as well as current literature, Burkley offers a few possible ways nursing schools and teaching hospitals can address this issue. […]

2018-04-30T08:23:05-04:00April 30th, 2018|Ethics, Nursing, nursing career, nursing students|4 Comments
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Strong Nursing Management Empowers the Why

“Our managers are effective leaders because they care for us, which empowers us to care for others, and for this we are indescribably grateful.”

I recently had the opportunity to speak at the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses (AACN) UCLA Chapter 2018 Leadership Symposium, which centered around AACN’s current theme, “Guided by Why.” Along with AACN president Christine Schulman, other nurses and I explored the importance of staying connected to our “Why” in the midst of considerable challenges in and to our profession.

I found myself considering not only my original answer to “Why do I want to become a nurse?” but also “Why do I stay in nursing?” I found that a significant part of my answer to the second question has to do with the managers I am privileged to work under. It is their strong management that continually fuels my underlying “Why.”

Genuine care for staff well-being.

Our managers demonstrate to us time and again that they see and value us as people, not just cogs in a wheel that needs to keep turning at all costs.

Self-scheduling allows for flexibility. In our unit, we have self-scheduling: all nurses determine their own shifts, so long as every shift is staffed with the minimum required number of nurses and everyone […]

2018-03-05T08:23:27-05:00March 5th, 2018|Nursing, nursing career|1 Comment
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Will Millennials Stave Off a Threatened Nursing Shortage? Hard to Say

Photo © Cultura Creative (RF) / Alamy Stock Photo.

The aging of the baby boom generation means that a large proportion of the U.S. population will soon be living with health conditions that may require complex care. At the same time, it’s estimated that a million nurses will retire by 2030, resulting in an enormous loss of experience and knowledge, not to mention the possibility of a national nursing shortage.

Millennials to the rescue? It’s complicated.

Can millennial nurses help mitigate the effects of this workforce shift? As discussed in our February AJN Reports, “Nurses Pass the Baton: Exit Baby Boomers, Enter Millennials,” millennials (born between 1982 and 2000) are becoming nurses in larger numbers than any generation before them. In fact, the nursing workforce is expected to grow by 36% between 2015 and 2030.

Why this surge of millennials? Commentators have speculated that those who reached adulthood during the recent recession may be drawn to the relative job security of the nursing profession, or that this […]

2018-02-16T08:42:08-05:00February 16th, 2018|career, Nursing, nursing career|0 Comments
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Views expressed on the blog are solely those of the authors or persons quoted. They do not necessarily reflect AJN’s views or those of Wolters Kluwer Health/Lippincott Williams and Wilkins.
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