The Handoff

Making the shift from the bedside to nurse manager or nurse leader is one of the biggest challenges that nurses face. 

Our guest for this episode is well versed on this issue because her current role is all about creating professional development programs for nurses. Crystal Lawson is the Education Director at the American Organization for Nursing Leadership, overseeing their fellowships for nurse managers and directors. 

In this conversation, Crystal lets Dr. Dan pepper her with questions on everything from how new nurse leaders can settle into their roles, the difference between accountability and availability, and tips on budgeting, time management and boundary setting. She also shares some great tips for listeners who are interested in applying for one of the AONL’s fellowships. 

Links to recommended reading: 

• AONL Nurse Leader Fellowships
• Nurse Executive Competencies 
• Nurse Manager Competencies 

The full transcript for this episode can be found here: www.trustedhealth.com/the-handoff-podcast/crystal-lawson

As the COVID-19 pandemic has spread across the country and forced many nursing schools to pivot to online learning, the use of simulation in nursing curriculum has skyrocketed. And no one is more passionate about and more of an expert on simulation than our guest for this episode, KT Waxman. 

KT is an Associate Professor and the Director of the Executive Leadership DNP Program at the University of San Francisco and the immediate past president of the Society for Simulation in Healthcare. She’s been working in the field of simulation for 15 years and has seen her work take on more relevance than ever over the last several months. 

Dan and KT and I discuss the shift to VR and screen-based learning in both schools and hospitals, how she’s focused on helping nurses achieve the outcomes of their coursework while relying heavily on simulation and how simulation can be used in some lesser known scenarios, like leadership development. 

Links to recommended reading: 

• The California Simulation Alliance
• Position Statement on Use of Virtual Simulation during the Pandemic
• California Assembly Bill 2288: Nursing programs: state of emergency
• Health Care Finance for Nurse Executives
• Nursing Administration Quarterly 

The full transcript for this episode can be found here: www.trustedhealth.com/the-handoff-podcast/kt-waxman

The team at Trusted Health is getting ready to host our first-ever live episode of The Handoff!  Dr. Nurse Dan will be joined by our guest from episode one, Courtnay Caufield, Chief Nurse Executive at Kaiser Permanente’s Sunnyside Medical Center, to talk about all things mental wellness. 

In this conversation, we’ll be talking about how nursing leaders can support their teams with proven tools to help them build resilience, improve their mental wellness and ensure the best possible outcomes for their patients.  

The episode will be streamed live online at 2pm PT / 5pm ET on Monday, October 5 and Dan and Courtnay will be taking live questions from our audience. To register, please visit: https://www.bevycares.com/events/details/bevy-cares-trusted-health-presents-trusted-health-presents-the-handoff-podcast-live-stop-nurse-burnout-today/#/

As nurse leaders climb the career ladder and begin to manage teams and budgets, many find that the learning curve for the financial portion of their job is quite steep. Our guest for this episode is here to help nurses understand how they can meet this challenge and develop a better working relationship with their organization’s finance team. 

Deborah Stilgenbauer is a rare breed. She’s a former bedside nurse who now works on the finance team at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, where she helps Chief Nurse Executives with their budgeting, variance reporting and staffing modeling. 

Deborah and Dan talk about the biggest disconnect between nurses and finance, where she sees the biggest financial knowledge gap when it comes to nurse leaders, and how frontline clinicians can have a positive impact on their team’s budget.

They also talk about how New York-Presbyterian’s staff is doing in the wake of the city’s COVID surge this spring, as well as how the hospital has adjusted its staffing practices as a result. 

Links to recommended reading: 

• Trusted Health Frontline Nurse Mental Health & Well-being Survey

The full transcript for this episode can be found here: www.trustedhealth.com/the-handoff-podcast/deborah-stilgenbauer

In this episode of The Handoff, Dr. Nurse Dan gets to talk about his favorite topic -- innovation in nursing -- with innovation and design thinking expert Marion Leary. 

Marion is the Director Of Innovation at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing, where she teaches on topics including design thinking and disruption in the healthcare industry. She’s also the host of the Amplify Nursing Podcast. 

In this conversation, Marion shares how she is trying to infuse innovation methodology into every level of the curriculum at Penn and to give her students an innovation mindset that they can take with them into the field. She and Dan talk about what areas of nursing are most primed for change, how COVID-19 has inspired more nurses to develop solutions to the problems they see and how all nurses can bring innovation into their daily life. 

Links to recommended reading: 

• Design Thinking for Health 
• SONSIEL: Society of Nurse Scientists, Innovators, Entrepreneurs & Leaders 
• Amplify Nursing Podcast 

The full transcript for this episode can be found here: https://www.trustedhealth.com/the-handoff-podcast/marion-leary

In recent years, more and more hospitals and health systems have launched investment arms in order to discover and fund companies that can help solve some of their internal challenges. 

Our guest for this episode is Cyril Philip, a Principal at Providence Ventures, where he focuses on investments in healthcare technology, tech-enabled services, and digital health. We talk about the kinds of companies that get him excited and what technology he’s looking to invest in. 

He also shares how he engages clinicians in his vetting and due diligence process, and why it’s so important for him to get them excited and involved before he decides to make an investment. 

And for all of our listeners out there who are budding entrepreneurs, Cyril shares some great advice about getting your company off the ground and looking for investment, including the one question he always encourages entrepreneurs to ask themselves. 

Links to recommended reading: 

• Providence Ventures blog
• Leave Your Job (But Stay in Nursing) - Trusted Health Blog

The full transcript for this episode can be found here: www.trustedhealth.com/the-handoff-podcast/cyril-philip

Staffing has long been one of the Achilles heels of the nursing profession, confounding nurse managers and nurse leaders alike, and taking up an inordinate amount of time. Our guest for this episode is an expert on the topic and has taken her cues from other industries to treat this as a data science problem. 

Early in her career, Therese Fitzpatrick was a chief nursing officer for various hospitals and health systems in the midwest before taking a turn as an entrepreneur, receiving her PhD in sociology and becoming a professor in the University of Illinois at Chicago’s School of Public Health. Today she is an executive at consulting firm Kaufman Hall, where she helps hospitals across the country assess their clinical and operational performance, and optimize their staffing.

In this episode Therese walks us through how she applies big data to the problems of staffing and workforce optimization, some low-tech ways that nurse managers can approach scheduling, and how COVID-19 will impact the evolution of the nursing workforce. Therese believes that robust float pools driven by Millenial and Gen Z nurses are the future and encourages nurse leaders to include them in conversations around staffing and workforce.

Links to recommended reading: 

• Improving Quality of Nursing Worklife: A Global Perspective Using Labor Optimization for Nurse Staffing
• The Art and Science of Nurse Staffing (AACN)
• Effective Staffing Takes a Village: Creating the Staffing Ecosystem
• Advanced Analytics Must Drive the Next Round of Productivity Initiatives
• https://www.kaufmanhall.com/

The full transcript for this episode can be found here: www.trustedhealth.com/the-handoff-podcast/therese-fitzpatrick 

What is the ideal interval between shift rotations? Does splitting sleep work? How long is the ideal nap? What’s the difference between a power nap and a restorative nap? 

On this episode of The Handoff, Dan is joined by Washington State University Professor Lois James, who is an expert on the role of sleep in performance. She and Dan speak about the ways in which the culture of nursing is often in conflict with good sleep habits. She shares some very practical fatigue countermeasures, as well as strategies that hospitals and nurse leaders can take to optimize shift lengths for their staff. 

Dr. James’s other research interest is racism and implicit bias in healthcare, and she also speaks about the dangers of implicit bias in nursing, how those biases are formed and strategies for overcoming them. 

Links to recommended reading: 

• https://nursing.wsu.edu/ 
• https://dailyevergreen.com/8362/news/sleep-and-racial-bias-affect-police-officer-judgement/
• https://www.researchgate.net/publication/290437363_The_Reverse_Racism_Effect_Are_Cops_More_Hesitant_to_Shoot_Black_Than_White_Suspects
• https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=QW-xUh4AAAAJ&hl=en
• https://news.wsu.edu/2014/09/02/deadly-force-lab-finds-racial-disparities-in-shootings/
• https://www.trustedhealth.com/blog/sickness-sleep-nurses-nightshift 
• https://www.trustedhealth.com/blog/nurse-stress-sleep-not-anymore 

The full transcript for this episode can be found here: 

www.trustedhealth.com/the-handoff-podcast/lois-james

Critical care nurses have played a crucial role in the fight against COVID-19, and many have had a front row seat to how the virus has affected patients. Our guest, Megan Brunson, is a 20 year veteran of the ICU and the immediate past president of the American Association of Critical Care Nurses, which is the largest specialty nurses association in the US.

On this episode of The Handoff, Megan and Dan talk about everything from the health disparities she sees firsthand with COVID patients in the hospital she works in in Texas, why she thinks now is a good time for nurses to consider a career in critical care, and her advice to nurses and nurse managers on how to prevent burnout. 

Megan has been at the bedside for 23 years, with 20 of those in the ICU. She has worked the night shift for her entire career and is passionate about the role of sleep in keeping nurses mentally and physically healthy.

Links to recommended reading: 

• https://www.aacn.org/nursing-excellence/dear-world
• https://www.trustedhealth.com/nursing-specialties-guide/critical-care-nurse

The full transcript for this episode can be found here: www.trustedhealth.com/the-handoff-podcast/megan-brunson

2020 has been an unprecedented year for all nurses, and nursing students are no exception. The pandemic has prevented many students from meeting their in-person clinical hours, setting off legislative fights in some states and delaying graduation in others. 

Our guests Andrew Rohrer and Caeli Matanky are the president and vice president of the California Nursing Students’ Association, respectively. Dan chats with them about the transition from in-person instruction to distance learning, how nursing school is teaching diversity and what it’s like to look for a job as a recent nursing graduate. 

Andrew is currently enrolled in a joint ADN/BSN program between Modesto Jr. College and Cal State Stanislaus. He started the CNSA chapter at his school and ultimately became the president of the entire association. Caeli graduated from Sonoma State’s nursing program this spring and was CNSA’s vice president. Since our conversation, she has since accepted a job on the Cardiac Telemetry Unit at Adventist Health in Rohnert Park, CA. Andrew can be reached at pres (at) cnsa (dot) org and Caeli can be reached at vp (at) cnsa (dot) org.

Links to recommended reading: 

• https://www.cnsa.org/
• https://www.trustedhealth.com/blog/advice-for-new-grad-nurses-2020 
• https://www.trustedhealth.com/blog/25-things-they-didnt-tell-you-in-nursing-school-but-we-will 

The full transcript for this episode can be found here: www.trustedhealth.com/the-handoff-podcast/andrew-caeli