This month’s featured “Get to Know Nurse” is Kelly Hyde, a certified med-surg nurse at Oregon Health and Science University medical center. I got the chance recently to chat with Kelly about how she got started in her nursing career.

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Jamie:                         Kelly, welcome to Nursing Notes Live. First off, I’d like to ask our Get-to-Know nurses what drew them to nursing. Why did you become a nurse, Kelly?

Kelly:                          Well, I was a civil engineer for about twelve years and really enjoyed that profession as I was kind of engineering storm water and drinking water systems to promote public health. But I really wanted to kind of pull back from that and do something that it was a lot more personable, working more closely with people and their lives and their individual stories. So I decided to go into nursing to kind of implement my critical thinking skills and those sorts of things with a more tangible effect, really, one-on-one.

Jamie:                         So you really were doing something that was really a public health role but not necessarily a healthcare role but just something that was affecting public health. That’s interesting. Had you known someone else that was a nurse or was this just something that just intrigued you when you moved into it?

Kelly:                          Actually, I kind of grew up in a healthcare-related family. My mom and my grandmother are both nurses. My father is a hospital administrator. So I kind of grew up hearing about healthcare around the dinner table kind of thing. It was something I was always exposed to growing up. Yes.

Jamie:                         Kind of the insider’s view you have with the administrator and everything else. That’s interesting. What drew you into Med-Surg nursing?  A lot of nurses traditionally start in Med-Surg and then move into other specialties. But Med-Surg is a specialty unto itself, what kept you there?

Kelly:                          As a student nurse, actually, I did most of my clinical nursing in Med-Surg and I guess I just got lucky as I enjoyed my clinical placement so much that I decided to go with that as my specialty. I work on a surgical specialty floor for gastrointestinal surgeries and I’ve always been fascinated with the GI system and wound care. The unit that I landed on happened to be really doing some interesting in-depth kind of on the front end of things work with wound care and GI specialties. I just really enjoyed. I thought it was fascinating and decided to stay there. So that’s where I’ve been ever since I was a student.

Jamie:                         I hear that time and again from nurses who say there was a section or a segment of their clinical rotations in nursing school that resonated with them and that’s what got them into a specific specialty. I use that as a way to say, “Look, keep your mind open because you just know what area of your clinical might click with you.” Certainly, it seems like Med-Surg and, specifically, surgical and GI seemed to really click with you. What is it about wound care? Certainly we’re seeing a lot of more wound care issues with a lot of patients. Is there something in particular that you really enjoy?

Kelly:                          Well, I think there’s a lot of dynamics behind and around the wound care that are fascinating about how the wound came to be and how you get it to heal in terms of looking not just the wound itself but other things that are going on with the patient. Whether it’s pain or whether it’s diabetes like blood sugar control or nutrit...