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Sharon Rogone of Small Beginnings Shares Her Nurse Entrepreneur Story
In this month’s episode, Nursing Notes Lives looks at nurse entrepreneurs. This month’s featured Get-To-Know nurse, Sharon Rogone, uses her experience as a NICU nurse to create specialty products to improve care for these tiny patients with her business “Small Beginnings.” I asked her how she decided to become a nurse and what led her to branch out on her own with a new patient care innovation.
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MP3 Audio Podcast
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Sharon: When I was a kid I was a candy striper. I was always fascinated by medicine and science. I looked at nursing as a way of helping people. The candy striper, you do all the dirty jobs. That you watch all the people do all the great things that they do for people and that’s where I wanted to go.
Jamie: Where did you go to school and how did that progressed? Did you start off in an RN program or did you go right into a BSN program? I know this was a few years ago.
Sharon: Well, I got married young. I started back to school actually when I was in my late thirties. I became an LVN first. Then I went into a RN program. I got my Associate degree and I do not have a BSN. I found neonatal nursing when I was in LVN and I worked in the unit as an LVN and was taking on greater responsibilities because I was good and passionate about what I did in there. That’s when I decided to go back to school and get my RN. Like I said, I was very passionate about “Do no harm” that’s an oath that we take as nurses. Nurses are out there without the tools to do no harm and that bothered me greatly. That’s why I started doing things to make the job better for the baby, better for the nurses and cost-effective. If you don’t make them cost-effective, then you’re not going to do any good. If they’re too labor-intensive to make, your products aren’t going to get on the market because the units are not going to buy them.
Jamie: We see a lot of nurses out there and people listening to the show are going to be nodding their heads, I know, when they think about this. But we’re constantly innovating, making do with the tools that we have to adapt them to a new task or job that they weren’t originally intended to be used for simply because we have a need to fill. Many times you sit there and you scratch your head and go, “Wow! I wish there was a better way to do this,” and you did that. I looked at your first product you ever came up with called the “Bili-Bonnet Phototherapy Mask.” A lot of people may know what the phototherapy mask is but why don’t you tell us a little bit about what your thought-process was when you first came up with this idea and what exactly it does – the advantages it brings over what was there before?
Sharon: Okay. When I was in the unit, it was a long time ago, there were very few products for the babies. We used to cut black construction paper in a shape of a mask and put cotton balls or eye pads behind it and use stockinettes from the ortho unit to make little hats to hold it in place. Gradually, the bigger companies started coming out with products that were not easy for the nurse to use, didn’t stay in place well. I came up with this idea of using the burn net and making it into a bonnet. I was making them by hand for myself. Other nurses started seeing, “Could you make me one of those?” It just kind of grew from there, just kind of snowballed. I just had one product that started my business with about $3,000.00 and it just kind of snowballed.
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In this month’s episode, Nursing Notes Lives looks at nurse entrepreneurs. This month’s featured Get-To-Know nurse, Sharon Rogone, uses her experience as a NICU nurse to create specialty products to improve care for these tiny patients with her business “Small Beginnings.” I asked her how she decided to become a nurse and what led her to branch out on her own with a new patient care innovation.
—-
MP3 Audio Podcast
Facebook
—-
Sharon: When I was a kid I was a candy striper. I was always fascinated by medicine and science. I looked at nursing as a way of helping people. The candy striper, you do all the dirty jobs. That you watch all the people do all the great things that they do for people and that’s where I wanted to go.
Jamie: Where did you go to school and how did that progressed? Did you start off in an RN program or did you go right into a BSN program? I know this was a few years ago.
Sharon: Well, I got married young. I started back to school actually when I was in my late thirties. I became an LVN first. Then I went into a RN program. I got my Associate degree and I do not have a BSN. I found neonatal nursing when I was in LVN and I worked in the unit as an LVN and was taking on greater responsibilities because I was good and passionate about what I did in there. That’s when I decided to go back to school and get my RN. Like I said, I was very passionate about “Do no harm” that’s an oath that we take as nurses. Nurses are out there without the tools to do no harm and that bothered me greatly. That’s why I started doing things to make the job better for the baby, better for the nurses and cost-effective. If you don’t make them cost-effective, then you’re not going to do any good. If they’re too labor-intensive to make, your products aren’t going to get on the market because the units are not going to buy them.
Jamie: We see a lot of nurses out there and people listening to the show are going to be nodding their heads, I know, when they think about this. But we’re constantly innovating, making do with the tools that we have to adapt them to a new task or job that they weren’t originally intended to be used for simply because we have a need to fill. Many times you sit there and you scratch your head and go, “Wow! I wish there was a better way to do this,” and you did that. I looked at your first product you ever came up with called the “Bili-Bonnet Phototherapy Mask.” A lot of people may know what the phototherapy mask is but why don’t you tell us a little bit about what your thought-process was when you first came up with this idea and what exactly it does – the advantages it brings over what was there before?
Sharon: Okay. When I was in the unit, it was a long time ago, there were very few products for the babies. We used to cut black construction paper in a shape of a mask and put cotton balls or eye pads behind it and use stockinettes from the ortho unit to make little hats to hold it in place. Gradually, the bigger companies started coming out with products that were not easy for the nurse to use, didn’t stay in place well. I came up with this idea of using the burn net and making it into a bonnet. I was making them by hand for myself. Other nurses started seeing, “Could you make me one of those?” It just kind of grew from there, just kind of snowballed. I just had one product that started my business with about $3,000.00 and it just kind of snowballed.