We explore nurse anesthetists, the oldest recognized advanced practice nursing specialty this month on Nursing Notes Live. In this episode of the podcast, I got the chance to sit down and interview nurse anesthetist Kenneth Wofford, assistant professor in the graduate school of nursing and nurse anesthesia program at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md. Here’s that interview with Kenneth.

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Jamie Davis:         Ken, welcome to Nursing Notes Live. It’s great to have you here on the show. I’d like to start off, first of all, by thanking you for your service in the Navy as a nurse and to our country.

Kenneth:              Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.

Jamie:                   Let’s start off and ask you, first of all why you wanted to become a nurse?

Kenneth:              Well, for me, it’s a very natural transition. I joined the Navy back in 1992. I came in as a hospital corpsman, actually, as a medic. At that time, I was looking for future opportunities to expand my skills and get an education and I had met and worked with nurses in the course of becoming a corpsman. I had seen what they do and found that to be pretty fascinating. Certainly it’s a job that offers a lot of value to you as a person. There’s no wondering why you go to work. There’s no aspect of futility to it. Every day is very rewarding.

Jamie:                   Great. It’s interesting. I actually as well started in the civilian sector as an EMT and then paramedic before I became a nurse and had much the same thoughts as I was interacting with nurses in the capacity of bringing patients to the ER and things. I really saw that they had a purpose and a sense of calling that I didn’t see in other professions necessarily.

Kenneth:              The other thing about nursing that you realize as you start to look into it is that it’s usually broad. There’s room for almost everybody within nursing. If you like computers, we have nurse informatics folks. If you like kids, we got nurses who do primarily with pediatrics. If you don’t like hanging out in a hospital, we have Community Health Nursing. So there’s room for almost any preference for work environment or work style within nursing as long as you have that core commitment to help others.

Jamie:                   You’re a nurse anesthetist now and educator. I’m curious if you can just kind of go over the path that your career took that drew you to becoming a nurse anesthetist?

Kenneth:              Well, for me, I was an ICU nurse for four years. And I became a CCRN, a Certified Clinical Care Nurse. The parts of that job that I really found the most fascinating was the Systems Analysis piece of it. You would take care of people who are basically have malfunctioning physiological system. On a day-to-day, hour-to-hour, minute-to-minute, you would have to try to figure out what was not working properly in the system and will apply the appropriate interventions to try and restore homeostasis, keep them alive for another few minutes, another hour, another day until they could heal enough to get better, get on their feet and get out. As I started to look at the pieces that I enjoyed versus the pieces of it that I found a little less feeling at a particular job, really anesthesia offered me a chance to do the things that I really found the most fascinating about it. That chance to be able to look at and analyze systems and intervene and do all that work in a very short time span minus a lot of the other things that I was not as fascinated in the ICU such as the administrative aspects and things like that. From there, the other part about being in anesthesia, they really value the autonomy. We take care of patients in collaboration with our surgical peers and in collaboration with other anesthesia professionals. So really it’s you who make your own decisions. You choose how you’re going to take care of them.