Get the chance to sit down and chat with our Get to Know Nurse this month, Barbara Edwards. Barbara is a clinical nurse leader at St. Lucie Medical Center in Florida. Here’s that segment with Barbara.

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Jamie Davis:         Barbara, I just want to take a moment to welcome you, first of all, to Nursing Notes Live. It’s great to have you here on the show.

Barbara Edwards:      Great. I’m excited to be a part of it.

Jamie Davis:         I always try to ask the nurses that we have on the show to talk to us a little bit about their background in nursing: why they wanted to become a nurse and some of the path that they went through that led them to where they are today.

Barbara:                  I thought a lot about why did I become a nurse and I don’t know at any one point, I’m not one of those people who grew up and said, “I always wanted to be a nurse.” Actually, when I started my education, I was looking towards a couple of other things. Then I was in my early 20s and my younger sister actually was in a nursing program. I started talking to her and she would tell me about some of the experiences she had, some of the opportunities she had to really be able to make a difference for patients and to make a difference for the families that she was caring for. It made me become interested in nursing. I got a little bit of information. I did start my nursing career in an ADN program. So my first nursing degree was an associate degree.

Jamie Davis:         What was your progression? Did you start out on a Med-Surg unit or were you specializing in other areas first?

Barbara:               I actually started on a General Med-Surg unit and, from there, I went and worked in an Orthopedic and Neuro unit. I really enjoyed working in orthopedics. We did a lot of total knee replacements, total hip replacements and some back surgeries. I did that for about six years. At that point, I was looking for ways to continue my education, to continue grow in my nursing knowledge and there was a position available as a charge nurse on a Med-Surg unit and I actually opted to go back to Med-Surg and take that position as a charge nurse and I did that for a years. I did that for a good five or six years also. I really was at a point where I wanted to do more. I wanted more education. But I enjoyed taking care of patients. I enjoyed being at the bedside. I enjoyed my role as a charge nurse where I was supporting the nurses in the nursing care that was being provided. So I went ahead and I did go back and I did get a Bachelor’s degree in Nursing. But again I didn’t have that desire for an advanced practice role because, at that time, I looked at a lot of advanced practice roles, and not all, but a lot of them as leaving that bedside care and I really enjoyed that and working with some of the newer nurses. And it happened to be – I suppose it was probably somewhere around 2005 – the American Association of Colleges of Nursing had just put out a new white paper on a new role in nursing. It is the first new role to be added to nursing since the nurse practitioner and that was for the clinical nurse leader. And that really got my attention because a clinical nurse leader is an advanced generalist. So you have to go back to school and get your Master’s degree in Nursing. But what it did is it really focused on the tools that you needed to be able to provide and to oversee professional nursing care that was being provided in a lot of different arenas not necessarily only at an acute care facility. There’s clinical nurse leaders in home health,