Meet Pamela Stewart Fahs, holder of the Dr. G. Clifford and Florence B Decker Endowed Chair in Rural Nursing at Binghamton University, and Editor-in-Chief for the Online Journal of Rural Nursing and Health Care, and Audrey Snyder, an Assistant Professor of Nursing at the University of Virginia and nurse coordinator for Community Outreach at UVA Health System. Here’s what they have to say about the role of the rural nurse.

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Jamie Davis:         Hi and welcome both of you to Nursing Notes Live. One of the things I like to do at the beginning of each of these interviews is just ask you each to briefly share your background in nursing: why did you become a nurse and what led you through your career path to where you are today. Audrey, why don’t you go first?

Audrey:                 My experience with healthcare started with my grandmother being cared for in our home four about nine years. She was on a hospital bed and required nursing care that was provided by public health and home health nurses as well as the family. I learned a lot about nursing before I became a nurse. That really is what influenced me to take that career path. My background has been mostly in emergency critical care flight. Until about the last 10 years when I really began to identify a lot of the issues in the emergency department of reasons why patients were continuing to come back or why patients were coming in and being critically ill and having to be admitted to an ICU. A lot of them focused on patients just not getting access to healthcare. If a patient may have seen a physician yesterday or last month or three months ago or even last year, it may not be in the shape they’re in at this admission or at this time for us to actually have to admit them. So I have evolved in my work to focus more on access to care and how patients receive that care in trying to work with underserved areas. I’m currently teaching at the University of Virginia and I’m working with a nurse-managed clinic to actually improve access to care especially in regards to cardiovascular disease and pulmonary disease for patients. We’re also using that clinic as a site for our students who are going into predominantly family nurse practitioner as an educational degree. I also now work in a community hospital that’s in a rural area, part-time as a hospitalist as well.

Jamie:                   Fantastic. Pam, go ahead.

Pam:                     Well, I started in nursing about 30 years ago. I grew up in southeastern Kentucky, Harlan County, a small coal mining area. And I probably became interested in nursing because of the nurse that worked in our local clinic. She was an African-American woman who was very well-versed in nursing. I think the first thing that really attracted me to her role was how professional she looked when she went to work every day. Back in those days, there was the blue cape and the white uniform. I was very impressed with that. But then over the years, as I grew up in that community, I saw how she actually functioned in the clinic and she became a manager of the clinic. So she went from being a staff nurse to actually managing most of the patient care that occurred in that clinic. I had a very disconnected past into nursing. I was a high school dropout. I was in radio for a while. I did a lot of odd jobs. When I was 26, I decided I really needed to do something with my life and I kind of always thought about nursing and looked into getting into nursing and wound up going back and getting my associate degree and then my Bachelor’s and my Master’s and finally I finished my...