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 open […]

2018-05-10T14:55:24-04:00May 9th, 2018|nursing career|1 Comment
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Counting on Colleagues (and Former Students) When a Family Member is Hospitalized

Rarely do we consider what it might be like to see [a former student’s] face across the bed of a desperately ill loved one.   

Illustration by Janet Hamlin. All rights reserved.

That’s from AJN‘s May Reflections essay by nursing professor Amy Kenefick Moore, who shares her family’s experience over the hectic days that follow a terrible accident in which her stepson sustains critical injuries.

When her stepson is admitted to a hospital affiliated with her school of nursing, Moore reaches out on her university LISTSERV to ask the nurses working at that hospital to watch out for her family member. “Responses flew back,” with alumni working on the trauma service promising to take good care of Moore’s stepson.

Nurses as family members.

Whatever our nursing experience, when we’re on the scene as family members, we usually understand the basics of the clinical situation and its possibilities. Our knowledge of nursing and medicine and of our family member’s medical history, functional baseline, and beliefs about health and illness can be a great asset to those caring for our loved one. […]

2018-05-09T13:10:44-04:00May 7th, 2018|Nursing, nursing stories|0 Comments
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Recognizing the Value of Nurses, Health Care’s Often Silent Majority

“Inspire. Innovate. Influence.” That’s the theme the American Nurses Association set for this year’s Nurses Week. But for much of our recent history, however, nurses have not been considered particularly influential or innovative—despite the fact that during the 19th and early 20th centuries, nurses organized hospital systems (Isabel Hampton Robb), designed the public health system and implemented school nursing and community-based care (Lillian Wald), and demonstrated improved outcomes (Mary Breckenridge).

Somehow, as health care became more technology and intervention focused, we were relegated into the “background”—the silent majority at the point of care, but rarely the ones consulted on strategies and planning decisions. (My take: we didn’t directly bring in the revenue to support the higher cost of high-tech care.)

A dawning realization that nurses matter.

But I feel things are changing. Organizations whose goals were driven by quality care began to shift perspective when it became clear that nurses made a big difference in whether those goals could be realized. And as government and insurance reimbursements became increasingly tied to quality, safety, efficiency, and patient satisfaction with care, nurses began to matter even more. We’ve also come to realize that our costly health care system is not meeting the needs for too many Americans.

Now nurses are more visible than ever before. RNs in many areas, from acute and critical […]

2018-05-04T09:05:32-04:00May 4th, 2018|Nursing|0 Comments
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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 our […]

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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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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