While the recent pandemic caused devastating loss of life and strained health systems, it also brought into sharp focus nurses' pivotal role in healthcare and their enormous and largely untapped potential to shape patient care, as well as rethink how healthcare is organized and where it's delivered.

In the final edition of our multi-episode series centered on the Accelerating Nursing, Transforming Healthcare report we have a heart-to-heart with Nurse executive Julie Kennedy Oehlert, Chief Experience Officer at Vidant Health in rural eastern North Carolina. Sitting near the center of a non-traditional organizational hierarchy, with a 'most pit vibe', Julie describes the importance of pushing a lot of care, resources and healthcare needs deep into the region when working in a rural setting, a setting where your team members may also become your patients. For her, building a new organizational hierarchy based on love is key in helping health care providers reach people in low-trust communities. In moving her organization to a culture of love and empathy, Julie emphasizes the importance of trust in innovation while reinforcing the resilience of Vidant's nurses and health care providers at the onset of the pandemic. Because health care is not a transaction, it is a relationship, and love has everything to do with it.

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