Nurse Shanita Williams is a program officer at the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) for the National Center for Interprofessional Practice and Education (NC-IPE) cooperative agreement award in Rockville, Md. On Nursing Notes Live this month we learn how inter-professional collaboration between nurses and other health professionals impacts patient care. Shanita and host Jamie Davis talk about her nursing career path and the importance of providing a nursing perspective to hospitals to improve teamwork and patient outcomes.

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Jamie Davis:         Hi, Shanita, welcome to Nursing Notes Live. It’s great to have you here on the show. I’d like to start off with our first question – I always ask our nurses here on the show – and that is tell us a little bit about why you wanted to become a nurse.

Shanita:               Hi, thank you. When I think back about why I wanted to be a nurse, I always think about having pain and someone giving me a Tylenol and wondering, “How does the Tylenol know where to go where my pain is?” That was always in the back of my mind. How does the medicine work? And then as I got older and started to make a decision about where I would go, what would I be professionally, I had always thought I would be an engineer. I happened to be in a university that had a really strong nursing program and many of my friends were a part of that program. I would hear stories about while I was in engineering they were in nursing but we would tell stories about what we were doing in the classroom. And their stories of interacting with people and the cost of what was nursing science was so much more interesting than my story. So just hearing those stories made me want to have that experience. I have an opportunity to work with people and to treat people and make people feel better. That was sort of the foundational reasons why I went to nursing school.

Jamie:                   I know you work in a public health aspect of nursing now with the federal government, but tell us a little about your path for nursing? Where did you get started and how did you progress through your education to the point where you have a PhD at this point?

Shanita:               Sure, I started in a BSN program actually, a four-year degree. So my first degree was a BSN. I went to nursing school straight out of high school and I spent one year on an engineering track and then switched. I still graduated pretty much on time. Then I went to work on a MedSurg unit. The hospital quickly realized that I had more questions about why people were coming in with the illnesses and conditions that they had. I was curious about that. I ended up going back to school within a year and doing my Masters in Nursing. Both of my Bachelor’s and Master’s were at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. I went to my Master’s program fully expecting to have a clinical nurse bachelor’s degree to get that. And then I got exposed again through my peers, got exposed to the whole concept of a family nurse practitioner and immediately fell in love with that concept, at that way of that profession. The fact that they were in the community dealing with people in a primary care setting felt more natural, a natural fit for me. So I switched my major, even in my Master’s program, pretty much the same way I did in my Bachelor’s program. Switched my major over to the family nurse practitioner. My first job after graduating was in a pediatric practice. I spent a year in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina doing great work. I thought was way too easy. It was way too much fun. I felt like playing with children. I thought it has to be more difficult than this. So I stayed there only a year and then moved to Atlanta,