Pediatric home and palliative care nurse Greg Burns of HomeHealth Visiting Nurses of Southern Maine joins host Jamie Davis to talk about his experiences as a nurse and his choice of home health, palliative and hospice care as a focus for his nursing career. He is focused on pediatrics and parent education for infants who are able to leave the hospital, but deal with developmental obstacles.

Nursing Notes Live is an audio extension of the national award-winning monthly e-newsletter, Nursing Notes – which offers the latest industry news, trends and updates in nursing. You can subscribe to the e-newsletter at www.discovernursing.com. Each month’s Nursing Notes issue, hosted by nurse Jamie Davis, is accompanied by a select few episodes of Nursing Notes Live, which expands on the content and provides you greater insights into the topics presented in the e-newsletter. You can listen to previous episodes and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes!

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Jamie Davis: Hi, Greg, welcome to Nursing Notes Live, it’s great to have you on the show here. I thought I’d ask you our traditional first question for our Get-To-Know Nurse of the month and that is, what is it about nursing that drew you to this profession?

Greg Burns: Well, thanks, Jamie. I actually wanted to be a nurse when I was a teenager, when I was about 16 actually. I did some work on as a junior firefighter and rescue personnel and got in EMT when I was quite young. I decided early on, at that point, that I really wanted to kind of get into nursing. I had a chief who I worked on there, who was a nurse at one of the local hospitals, and she was kind of my role model and that really – watching her work, watching how she dealt with people really intrigued me and made me want to come and follow into the profession.

Jamie: That’s interesting you said that. That’s actually partly my background. I was originally an EMT and a Paramedic and people kept saying you really treat patients like a nurse treats patients. You should continue and move forward and become a nurse. And that’s what drew me in the nursing school was that passion to continue building on my healthcare education and continue going that direction. It’s interesting. You’re actually the first person I’ve interviewed that said that though, that had a similar career path, so that’s interesting. What was your educational path like that drew you into eventually going into the career path of HomeHealth Care?

Greg: Yes. Out of high school I started pre”-nursing”, what it was called at that point in time, through USM, University of Southern Maine, Portland and Gorham. There are two campuses actually. The pre-nursing track was kind of all the sciences and all that kind of stuff. To actually get into the nursing school, you have to then reapply. I had to kind of do that. Before I did that, I did three years actually of pre-nursing because I did a kind of music/theater minor as well. I actually took a year off in the middle of that, kind of just to re-evaluate and make sure I was making the right decisions, make sure that is what I wanted to do. I went back in earnest after that year off, having reapplied to the School of Nursing and being accepted. I was the only guy out of 43 students at that point in time. It’s really interesting. I feel like I had a little bit of a tough time in nursing school because of being a guy, which was really interesting because a lot of guys that I talked to, they talk about it being not having kind of hard time. I think I felt almost like I was having to break into a sorority as it were, do you know what I mean, in a way. And so that was a really interesting piece for me. I graduated cum laude from University of Southern Maine and, prior to graduation,