The Handoff

Host Dani Bowie shares a quick teaser for the upcoming season of The Handoff, launching March 8, 2023 — available wherever you get your podcasts.

Our guest for our last episode of this season is Bonnie Clipper, a nurse futurist and thought leader, a former chief nurse executive, a fellow at the American Academy of Nursing, a startup coach, a consultant, a faculty member at multiple schools of nursing and the Chief Clinical Officer at Wambi.

Bonnie is a repeat visitor who came on the show last season to chat with Dan about the future of nursing in a conversation that got pretty spirited at times but seemed to resonate with many of you, as it became our most downloaded episode ever.

Today she's back to talk specifically about the skill set, attitude and competencies that nurse leaders need to survive in a post-COVID world based on her experience consulting and working with a variety of hospitals around the country.

Links to recommended reading:

• Episode 73: A candid conversation about the state of nursing
• The Nurse's Guide to Innovation: Accelerating the Journey
• The Nurse Manager's Guide to an Intergenerational Workforce

The full transcript for this episode can be found here: works.trustedhealth.com/handoff/bonnie-clipper-nurse-leader

Our guest for today's episode was just weeks into her new role as a nurse leader at Lehigh Valley Health Network when COVID-19 hit. Nichole Persing turned to her experience as an Ironman and an endurance athlete in order to cope with the logistical, physical and emotional challenges of managing an ICU in the middle of a once-in-a-generation pandemic.

She and Dan talk about the team-based approach to nursing that she pioneered to manage severe understaffing on her unit and how she's navigated her own mental health struggles coming out of the worst of the pandemic.

Links to recommended reading:

• The Strength to Heal

The full transcript for this episode can be found here: works.trustedhealth.com/handoff/nichole-persing-endurance

Our guest for this episode is Joni Watson, a healthcare and leadership consultant who also teaches Advanced Decision Making in Healthcare for PhDs at Duke University's School of Nursing. She was also previously the Senior Vice President for Strategic Nursing Transformation at Ascension, where she and Dan worked together.

In this conversation, Dan and Joni talk about how she crafted her thoughtful and deliberate approach to nursing leadership. She shares why she thinks that every leader should have a manifesto, and how hers has helped her identify and stay true to her values over her two decade long nursing career. She also talks about the concept of a "challenge network," why they're important and how she cultivates one at work.

Links to recommended reading:

• Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know
• In Defense of Troublemakers: The Power of Dissent in Life and Business
• The Future of Nursing 2020-2030

The full transcript for this episode can be found here: works.trustedhealth.com/handoff/joni-watson-leadership-manifesto

Our guest for this week is Josh Wymer: an all-star nurse leader with deep expertise in change management, information governance, and digital innovation. Josh is currently the Chief Health Information Officer for the San Diego Market at Defense Health, and is also pursuing his Doctor of Nursing Practice in Executive Leadership program at Johns Hopkins, where he is looking at the impact of specialty certification in the context of professional development and impact on nursing practice.

He and Dan cover a range of issues related to nurse leadership, with a deep dive into the eight essential nurse leader competencies, how they've evolved in light of the pandemic, and which one Josh thinks is the most important.

Links to recommended reading:

• Preparing nurse leaders for 2020
• Nursing Leadership and COVID-19: Defining the Shadows and Leading Ahead of the Data
• Progressing toward specialty certification as the National Standard for Nursing

The full transcript for this episode can be found here: works.trustedhealth.com/handoff/josh-wymer-nurse-leader-competencies

In today's episode, we're talking about a subject that we haven't really gotten into in the previous five seasons of the show: the payer side of healthcare and its impact on nurses. Our guest, Judy Kunisch, has a lot of experience – and a lot of opinions on this topic – and even Dan learned quite a bit during their discussion.

Judy is a former bedside nurse turned vice president for a Fortune 100 insurance company turned consultant who primarily works with payers and is passionate about serving as a bridge between those two worlds. She believes that nurses don't have enough exposure to this side of the business and she wants to change that. Today she gives us a deep dive on the evolution of value-based payments and how they intersect with nursing, as well as how nurse leaders can use this information to make the case for more resources within their organization.

Links to recommended reading:

• What are the value-based programs?
• Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP)
• Systems Thinking for Strategic Leadership

The full transcript for this episode can be found here: works.trustedhealth.com/handoff/judy-kunisch-payers

Our guest for this episode is one of the leading voices in LinkedIn on all things healthcare recruitment and she has some strong opinions about today's hiring market and what both sides need to do to succeed. Krista Whiting is the Vice President of Healthcare Recruitment for Parkwood International, where she specializes in acute care leadership in Southern Texas.

Today she and Dan talk about what candidates can do to stand in the hiring process, including those with non-traditional backgrounds, the skill she's seeing more and more hospitals look for and her advice to hiring managers on how to get talent in the door faster.

Links to recommended reading:

• Karaoke for a Cause
• Understanding & Addressing Nurse Turnover
• A Look into Retaining Your Nursing Workforce
• Forecasting Hospital Hiring Needs

The full transcript for this episode can be found here: works.trustedhealth.com/handoff/krista-whiting-healthcare-recruiting

According to a survey put out by Trusted Health earlier this year, half of all nurses have been the subject of an attack, intimidation or assault by a patient or patient's family member since the start of the pandemic.

Our guest for today's episode, Mel Cortez, experienced this first hand working in a Baltimore area ICU. Later, when she saw how many nurses were leaving the profession because of workplace violence, she was inspired to start Cortex Gold, a joint venture between two nurses and a Marine Corps veteran whose mission is to help hospitals create a safer, more secure workplace for nurses and other healthcare workers.

Today she and Dan talk about what a culture of safety actually looks like, Mel's protocol-based approach to handling incidents of violence and the role that nurse managers and nurse leaders play in making hospitals a safer place to work.

Links to recommended reading:

• Fact Sheet: Health Care Workplace Violence and Intimidation, and the Need for a Federal Legislative Response
• Toolkit for Mitigating Violence in the Workplace

The full transcript for this episode can be found here: works.trustedhealth.com/handoff/mel-cortez-violence-against-nurses

Welcome back to Season 6 of The Handoff. In today's episode, Dan speaks with Rayne Soriano.

Rayne has carved out his own path in nursing and continually leaned into his passions in order to build a career that is uniquely suited to him. After an incredible 25 years at Kaiser Permanente, Rayne is currently the Regional Director for Operations and Nursing Professional Practice at Kaiser Permanente Hawaii. It's a role that weaves together his interests and skill sets in education, leadership, informatics, operations and management, and in this conversation, he and Dan touch on all of those topics.

Rayne shares how he's seeing data, technology and informatics impact the profession of nursing, from new grads all the way up to nurse leaders, as well as how living in Hawaii has impacted his experience of being a nurse and how Kaiser is thinking about staffing and scheduling. The full transcript for this episode can be found here: works.trustedhealth.com/handoff/rayne-soriano-kaiser-veteran

To close out season 5 of The Handoff we're actually welcoming back a repeat visitor to the show. Dani Bowie joined us last season to talk about scheduling and staffing, and since that conversation, she's actually joined the team at Trusted Health as their Vice President of Clinical Strategy & Transformation, where she's helping health systems transform their nursing workforce programs.

We're very happy to welcome her back to the show today to talk about a topic that is very close to both our hearts: nurse mental health. For the third year in a row, Trusted Health is releasing its annual survey on frontline nurse mental health and well-being and Dani and Dan talked about the findings, as well as her thoughts on what the nurse leaders, hospitals and the industry as a whole can do to address the issues raised.

Links to recommended reading:

• 2022 Trusted Health Frontline Nurse Mental Health & Well-being Survey
• Episode 65: Solving the "travesty" that is nurse scheduling
• Nurse Staffing Think Tank: Priority Topics and Recommendations

The full transcript for this episode can be found here: https://works.trustedhealth.com/handoff/mental-health-survey-2022