Nurse Rosa's INsights

What happens when burnout breaks you open, and you decide to build something from the wreckage?

In this episode, Rosa sits down with Ashley Chancellor and Matthew Harless, co-founders of The Business of Hope, to explore why burnout in healthcare goes far deeper than exhaustion, and what hope, as a functional tool, can actually do for clinicians on the front lines.

Ashley Chancellor, RN spent 14 years as a nurse, much of it traveling the country as an ICU nurse. A fractured spine and severe PTSD during COVID took her off the floor indefinitely. What came next was a memoir, a coaching practice, and a mission: reminding the helpers of the world that they are worthy of the same compassion they give.

Matthew Harless, RN brings over twenty years of clinical experience across psychiatric care, emergency medicine, rehabilitation, and hospital leadership. He's the creator of the Harless Method and the Hope Assessment, tools designed to help burned-out clinicians measure where their hope actually stands and start moving toward recovery instead of self-blame.

Together, they're making the case that hope isn't a soft skill or a poster slogan. It's infrastructure. And it can be measured, built, and protected.

In this conversation, Rosa, Ashley, and Matt dig into the real difference between burnout and moral injury, walk through the Hope Assessment live on air, talk about what it looks like to use hope-informed care in real clinical settings, and ask the hard question: what would it actually take to fix this?

Resources mentioned in this episode:

hopeassessment.org

Meet Angie Cauthorn, a two-time stroke survivor and host of the Brain Friends podcast as she shares with Nurse Rosa Hart about gaps in stroke and aphasia aftercare and the community-based solutions she has built.

Angie describes developing aphasia after working in finance and realizing survivors are discharged medically stable but unprepared to navigate recovery. She shares her work as co-founder and president of the Aphasia Resource Collaboration Hub (ARCH), the R.O.S.A. symposium (Resource Orientation for Stroke and Aphasia) convening at Temple University - now in its fifth year -with panels, keynotes, and activities like line dancing, plus quarterly Science of Aphasia sessions. Angie also discusses creating an Aphasia Fantasy Football League to reduce isolation through shared interests. Both explore scaling these models and answer a “$1B grant” question, emphasizing standardized post-discharge navigation, community access, survivor-centered research, early stroke recognition, improved EMS, vocational rehab awareness, and the non-linear reality of stroke recovery.

Connect with Angie Cauthorn:

LinkedIN

Learn more about ARCH:

https://www.aphasiaresource.org/

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Invisible doesn't mean harmless, and Zoë Slaughter is done letting people pretend otherwise.

Zoë Slaughter joins Nurse Rosa for a candid conversation about living with food allergies, navigating a complex healthcare system, and building an advocacy movement through storytelling and policy action.

Zoë shares her personal journey from childhood food allergies to adult advocacy, breaking down how community support groups form, why misconceptions about food allergies persist, and what the latest research on early food introduction means for prevention. She also gets into the real financial burden of managing food allergies, including what she calls the "food allergy tax," and makes the case for free, universal access to epinephrine.

The conversation also touches on the power of documentary film and graphic content in health education, and how everyday people can move from awareness to action, locally and at the federal level.

In This Episode:

Resources Mentioned:

Connect with Zoë: Instagram @invisiblyallergic

Nurse Rosa's INsights is a nurse-led healthcare leadership and innovation podcast hosted by Rosa Hart, RN, available on the Health Podcast Library, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and all major platforms.

What would you do with a billion dollars to fix healthcare? For Sandra Johnson, SVP of Client Services at CliniComp, the answer is clear: solve interoperability, once and for all.

Rosa Hart sits down with Sandra to unpack one of healthcare's most persistent problems, fragmented data environments that slow clinicians down, create gaps in patient care, and quietly fuel burnout across health systems. Sandra brings 25 years of healthcare IT experience to a candid conversation about why interoperability is so hard to crack, what it takes to design technology that actually works for clinicians, and how CliniComp's System as a Service model is shifting the burden of implementation away from health systems so they can focus on what matters most.

In this episode:

Why interoperability remains healthcare's most foundational unsolved challenge

How fragmented data contributes to clinician burnout and care gaps

What vendor-agnostic interoperability means and why health systems need it

How CliniComp's System as a Service model removes the implementation burden from clinical teams

Why workflow integration is the real key to making data meaningful at the point of care

Guest: Sandra Johnson, CDH-E, SVP of Client Services, CliniComp

CliniComp: clinicomp.com

Connect with Nurse Rosa:

Follow Nurse Rosa's INsights in the Health Podcast Library

Get the Book:  Speak Up, Start Now ( Nurses Week Gift of the Year)

On social media: @NurseRosaSpeaks

Nurse Rosa's INsights is part of the Health Podcast Library. Subscribe, share with a colleague, and leave a review to help more healthcare professionals find this conversation.

What happens when a nurse gets splashed in the face with biohazardous waste and decides to do something about it? She builds a company. In this episode Rosa Hart, RN, BSN, SCRN, sits down with Sarah Waimon, RN, BSN, CEO of Waimon Innovations Inc. and creator of Looey, a nurse-invented medical device designed to protect healthcare workers from hazardous splash-back during bedpan and ostomy care.

Sarah shares her journey from 16 years of bedside nursing across medsurg, oncology, ICU, colorectal, and nursing supervision to becoming a nurse entrepreneur and medical device innovator. She breaks down the moment that changed everything, a contaminated splash to the face on a colorectal postoperative unit, and how it sparked the creation of Looey, a transparent shield that attaches to standard bedpan washers to contain biohazards and protect caregivers.

This episode covers nurse entrepreneurship, nurse-led innovation, healthcare worker safety, infection control, and why nursing ideas are the future of medical device development.

Topics covered:

Nurse-invented medical devices and nurse entrepreneurship

Occupational health and healthcare worker safety

Infection control and biohazard exposure prevention

Ostomy care and colorectal nursing

Bedpan washer safety and splash-back prevention

Nursing leadership and clinical innovation

Mental health gaps in nursing education and patient care

From bedside nurse to CEO: the nurse founder journey

Connect with Sarah Waimon:

Pre-order Looey: [email protected]

Connect with Nurse Rosa:

Follow Nurse Rosa's INsights in the Health Podcast Library

Get the Book: Speak Up, Start Now ( Nurses Week Gift of the Year)

On social media: @NurseRosaSpeaks

Nurse Rosa's INsights is your go-to podcast for nurses who are ready to lead, innovate, and speak up. Subscribe, share, and leave a review.

The culture killing your career isn't the patients. It's the colleagues.

Renee Thompson, DNP, RN, FAONL, FAAN, CSP has spent 32 years in nursing and the last 15 building one of healthcare's most important movements: a structured, proven approach to ending bullying and incivility in the workplace. As CEO and Founder of the Healthy Workforce Institute, she has seen what toxic culture does to nurses, to teams, and to patients, and she refuses to accept it as inevitable.

In this episode of Nurse Rosa's INsights, Renee breaks down why incivility is a patient safety issue, not just a morale problem, and what nurses and leaders can do right now to change the culture on their unit.

In this episode:

Connect with Renee:

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Can hearing aids prevent dementia? Hearing instrument specialist Madison Levine joins Rosa Hart to explore the connection between hearing loss and cognitive decline, and why treating your hearing early may be one of the most important things you can do for your brain health and longevity.

Madison founded "Levine Hearing" 11 years ago, building on her mother's 35-year legacy in audiology. She now leads a full clinical team offering hearing diagnostics, hearing aid fittings, ear hygiene, tinnitus care, and vestibular services, while speaking at national conventions to advance public awareness of hearing health.

In this episode you will learn why untreated hearing loss is linked to dementia and cognitive decline, how the ear-brain connection affects memory and longevity, what is driving the stigma around hearing aids and how that stigma is shifting, which innovations are expanding access to hearing care, and why early detection and treatment change long-term outcomes.

Connect with Madison Levine at

levinehearing.com

on Instagram at @levinehearing and @madisonlistens, and on LinkedIn.

Connect with Nurse Rosa

Instagram: @NurseRosaSpeaks

Get her Book: Speak Up, Start Now

What if the reason cancer wins isn't the tumor itself, but the silence it forces on your immune system?

Aaron Edwards grew up in Henderson, Kentucky, left home at sixteen for a bold academic experiment, and spent a decade in biotech working on some of the most cutting-edge gene therapies in the world before asking himself a hard question: why does promising science so rarely reach patients?

That question led him to Harvard, and then to KiraGen Bio, where he and his team are building what he calls "noise-cancelling headphones for cancer therapy." Using gene editing and AI, KiraGen is engineering immune cells that can finally hear through the suppressive environment solid tumors create, and fight back.

In this episode, Aaron and Rosa talk about the journey from a small Kentucky town to the frontier of CAR-T cell therapy, what glioblastoma patients and their families need to know right now, and why the future of cancer treatment should show up in your community clinic, not just at elite academic centers.

In this episode:

Connect with Aaron:

Every minute a stroke goes untreated, 1.9 billion neurons are lost. In this episode, Nurse Rosa Hart sits down with neurosurgeon Dr. David Dornbos III to talk about what is changing in stroke care, what still needs to change, and what he would do with a billion dollars to move the needle.

Dr. Dornbos is an Assistant Professor at the University of Kentucky Department of Neurological Surgery and a specialist in cerebrovascular and endovascular neurosurgery at the Kentucky Neuroscience Institute. With over 130 peer-reviewed publications, NIH funding for early stroke biology research, and a seat on the Executive Committee of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons, he is one of the sharpest minds working at the intersection of clinical care and innovation in stroke today.

Whether you are a bedside nurse, a stroke coordinator, or simply someone who wants to understand where brain attack care is headed, this conversation will leave you thinking differently about time, technology, and what it means to fight for your patients.

In this episode, you will hear about:

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Dr. David Dornbos III

Connect with Dr. Dornbos

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-dornbos-iii-27576635a/

Resources Mentioned

Congress of Neurological Surgeons (CNS) Podcast: https://www.cns.org/newsroom/podcasts

Connect with Nurse Rosa

Instagram: @NurseRosaSpeaks

If this episode resonated with you, share it with a nurse, a stroke survivor, or anyone who cares about what happens inside the walls of a hospital when time is running out. And if you are not subscribed yet, hit that button so you never miss a conversation.

Cooking fires are the number one cause of residential fires in America, and older adults are among the most vulnerable. In this episode, Nurse Rosa sits down with an AI-driven kitchen safety innovator and a leading occupational therapy researcher to talk about what aging in place actually requires and the tools making it possible right now.

Guests:

David Eby, CEO of CookTop Safety Corp., developed an AI-powered smart kitchen sensor that predicts and prevents cooking fires before they happen. As a personal caregiver to his own parents in their mid-eighties, his work is as personal as it is innovative.

Dr. Pamela Toto, PhD, OTR/L, BCG, FAOTA, FGSA is an occupational therapist, professor, and director of the Healthy Home Laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research focuses on strength-based, evidence-driven solutions that extend older adults' ability to live independently.

In This Episode:

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Nurse Rosa's INsights Podcast is produced in partnership with the Health Podcast Library.