For me, 2018 was a year of doing. It was a difficult year, not unlike many people, but I still got shit done. Your Nurse Friday has trended towards nursing and entrepreneur based posts, so I thought I would start off 2019 with a review of what I learned in 2018. There was a lot, but here are some of the highlights. I *almost* finished the greenhouse. In 2017 I started building a greenhouse in our yard, with the goal of having a Frankenstein-y greenhouse made of windows that I was planning to collect over the upcoming year. I did not have to wait that long, because after posting on freecycle.org, I was contacted by a retired scientist who was looking to replace all of the windows in his home and wanted to gift me all of his old ones. After a brief physics lesson on why I could not load 2000 lbs of windows into my Honda CRV, three trips, and *only* two broken windows later, I suddenly had everything I needed to build my greenhouse! After roughly building a frame and creating the skeleton for the building, I started to “pin” my windows in place by putting them […]
Having support when you are a nurse is critical to your career. From mentoring in nursing school to preceptoring when starting a new position, an experienced and positive nurse by your side can ensure your professional success. Outside of work, having friends and family that are there for you (even if they do not completely understand the stress of the job) can make a difference on those hard days giving you that much needed mental boost when things become overwhelming. It is a wonderful thing if you can find friends who are nurses outside of work, as they get the job, the stress, and the bizarre hours by which you lead your life. I am fortunate to have several friends who are nurses, not only those I made in nursing school but others I connected with in New Mexico and beyond. Nurse friends provide wonderful sounding boards, offer great perspectives from specialties different from your own, and get that crazy sense of humor you’ve developed over hours spent in not-so-normal situations. I recently had the opportunity to be interviewed by one of these fantastic nurse friends, Keith Carlson. I met Nurse Keith briefly many years ago in Santa Fe and fate kept […]
The Problem With Patient Satisfaction & Small Business When you own a small business, you live and die by customer satisfaction. You work hard to do right by your clients because one bad review can hurt just as much as one excellent referral can push your business to the next level. In medicine though, a nurse quite often is on the opposite end of that patient satisfaction scale. Advocating for what is right for the individual does not always mesh with what that individual really wants. Many nurses working in hospitals have received complaints, harassment, and even death threats from patients regarding their care, when in reality nurses were acting in the patient’s best interest (like not giving more pain medication than prescribed, or waiting until the correct time to give medication, instead of giving it earlier at the request of the patient). Relying solely on patient satisfaction to drive medically related situations is reckless and dangerous, both for the patient and the provider. They say patient satisfaction is killing us, and while I have written about this in the past, I have not really touched on its relevance when small business and medicine are combined. Client Centered Care Last […]
I recently had the opportunity to run the Big Sur International Marathon. I started to train in January, going to the gym 3-4 times per week for cardio and weight training in addition to my time spent getting my miles in on the road and local trails. I also kept a close watch on my diet, tightening it up as I neared the week of the race. I put in a considerable amount of work to get fit for the race, as this was key to how I was going to perform during the race as well as how fast my recovery would be afterward. As I trained around my work schedule, it struck me how much nursing is like running a marathon, and in honor of Nurse’s Week, I am going to expand a bit on this metaphor. My marathon day started at 3:30 AM, with me prepping my gear that I would need over the next several hours. I will have to admit I had neurotically checked my bag before leaving to fly to California as well as when we arrived – this was due to an unfortunate mistake made last year, in which my running bag was […]
“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.” Kurt Vonnegut Maximizing Your Efficiency I work all the time. I have been working all the time since I helped start our home care agency in 2011. Creating your own business is a business itself of fits and spurts – at the beginning you spend a considerable amount of time on paperwork, creating policies and processes, and getting your name out there. But then you hit a bit of a lull while you still continue to market yourself, all while anxiously awaiting your first client. Once you get going, you occasionally still have the lulls, during which you learn to tighten up procedures, pursue education, and shine up those marketing tactics which may have dulled over time. When you finally get comfortable with what you are doing, you start to dread and crave those lulls. Lulls are bad for business, but allow you a moment to breathe and make improvements. This difficult lesson is what I have learned – lulls are uncomfortable and scary, but if you are patient and persistent, you can use these times to shore up your resources and re-charge for […]
If you had told me ten years ago that I would be a nurse owning my own business, I probably would not have believed you. It is incredible how much can change over ten years (in fact, it is incredible how much can change in 24 hours) and I cannot even fathom where I will be in the next ten years. As a nurse and small business owner, I have learned so much, taking on more roles than I ever thought I could. My role as Chief Nursing Officer involves hiring new staff for Nurses With Heart Home Care – mostly caregivers, who assist our clients with everything from bathing and grooming to errand running and companionship care. Sitting on the other side of the hiring desk is a far cry from sitting in the chair as the interviewee. When we first started Nurses With Heart seven years ago, I was extremely nervous while interviewing potential candidates. I had set questions to ask, including the ridiculous standards of interviewing: What is your biggest weakness? Why did you apply for this job? If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be? (Well, not really for that last one, […]
Perseverance is something I constantly strive for – I may not be the best or the fastest, but I can keep going, which is why I enjoy running marathons. Perseverance is also something that has been required of me over the past year – as is with many others, 2017 was a difficult year. But, it was also a very productive year, and unfortunately I was not as good at documenting as I had hoped to be. So despite all of the tumultuousness of 2017, I achieved quite a few things, including building a green house, running a 50k, learning new marketing methods for our home health agency, and attending an awesome conference for nurse entrepreneurs. And while I started the Your Nurse Friday blog in 2016, I neglected blogging due to a variety of reasons – I was not sure of how to get started, I was too busy, I did not think anyone would read it, I was active on other social channels…because there are always a million excuses of why not to do something. So this year I will persevere again with my Your Nurse Friday blog. To start off this first blog of 2018, I will […]
With two hours of sleep and sitting on a turbulent plane cradling a bad cup of coffee, I started Aspire to be Inspired, by Keith Carlson. About one month prior to being airborne, Keith Carlson had sent me his new book to read. Having enjoyed his first book, Savvy Networking for Nurses, I was looking forward to Nurse Keith’s latest edition. As a disclosure, I became friends with Nurse Keith one year ago, when we met at the National Nurses in Business Conference in Las Vegas. Funnily enough, we are both from Santa Fe, and with a population of only 60,000 people, it took a conference in another state for us to meet. Getting back to the plane, bad coffee, and new book, I was pretty exhausted. The previous day had been a hard one, one where clients were unreceptive to nursing help, families wanted the opposite of what was needed, which was all topped off by rescuing a family member from a bad accident. But this is the day in the life of a nurse, some days are literal car wrecks and you do your best to salvage some peace of mind just knowing you made it through the […]
Caring is key to being a good nurse, going hand in hand with advocating for your patient’s needs. When it comes to caring for themselves, health professionals are notoriously bad, especially nurses. The working balance to maintain a healthy life is hard to maintain as human, especially if you are a nurse, or a business owner, or all three (which I happen to be). Even as I write this, I still question the legitimacy of the following story, not in the reality of the event, but in the noteworthiness of the complaint – which is where I believe the problem of self care for nurses is rooted (long story short: nurses make the worst patients). – – Apprehension, uncertainty, waiting, expectation, fear of surprise, do a patient more harm than any exertion. Remember he is face to face with his enemy all the time. – Florence Nightingale – – I found a lump in my right breast in December of 2016. My nurse’s knowledge taught me that women’s breast tissue texture can change with hormone fluxes related to menstrual cycles, can be the result of clogged ducts, or lymph node changes related to immunity issues. Despite the fact that I did […]
Just a Soup Away from Spring Beware the Ides of the First 70 Days of the Year I have always found the weeks leading up to spring (for 2017, spring will have sprung on Monday, March 20th) to be slow and irritating. Living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the weather vacillates between winter freezes and summer-like temperatures. This creates a challenge as a home health nurse, stretching my ability to effectively layer my clothing and as well as temper my patience for drivers who panic at just a dusting of snow on our Southwestern roads. My pre-spring stress levels are slightly lower than my winter stress levels, as if we do get a couple inches of snow it will probably be melted by noon, decreasing the likelihood of the dreaded shift call offs due to being “snowed in”. A Shift in Appetite Another challenge of these pre-spring weeks is that as I start to shed layers, I also realize that I am not a bear and my hibernation period should have never existed in the first place. Regret about all those comforting yet heavy winter meals begins to build and the compulsion to eat a bit lighter (aided by slightly […]