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Welcome to All About Nursing with your host Dr. Joyce Bachelor, executive nurse advisor Dr. Bachelor, who will present the significant role nurses play in providing healthcare in a multitude of healthcare settings. Listen to some of today's key nurses who work in practice in academia settings and talk about the challenges they face in today's modern medical world.
So please welcome the host of All About Nursing, Dr. Joyce Bachelor. Hi, I'm your host Dr. Joyce Bachelor on All About Nursing and we're live on the BBM Global Network and TuneIn Radio.
I'm excited to introduce All About Nursing this week since it is National Nurses Week. There are over 3.6 million nurses in the country who I hope are celebrating and enjoying the national recognition for the incredible difference they make in people's lives every day. I truly believe that the work nurses do is extraordinary and want to personally wish all the nurses who may be listening to have a wonderful nurse this week. I personally have been a nurse for over 40 years and I'll be sharing a little bit more about my background as we go through our dialogue this evening.
So you may be wondering why did I decide that I wanted to start this show and what is it that you might expect to be able to hear on the show and future sessions. So I had the opportunity to be interviewed about why I decided to become a nurse and share some highlights of my career in honor of Women's Empowering Month in December of last year. I enjoyed the opportunity to share some of my experiences to help inspire others and educate the public about nursing in general. There were a lot of people who had a lot of questions and an interest in learning more about the profession.
It reinforced for me the need to have nurses really share more about what they do in general and I want to highlight some of my colleagues who are leading incredible work not only in their organizations but also at the state and national level. I want to showcase the diversity of settings that nurses actually work in and the impact that they're having on healthcare every day. So for example next week I will have a guest who is Dr. Bob Dent who is actually will be sharing his insights on what it's been like to be a male nurse and what is still known to be a predominantly female profession but it is one that is changing as we have more men coming into the profession.
So I will just tell you a little bit that I originally decided to become a nurse at the age of five and so what happened to me at time is I was in an accident when I got hit by a truck crossing the street between park cars not paying attention like I was supposed to be. I sustained several injuries at that time that required me to be hospitalized for a pretty extended period of time. I found myself in a body cast that went from about the middle of my waistline down to both legs and so I was flat on my back for about 10 or 12 weeks and the perspective of what happens when you're laying flat like that is very different and at the time it was really very challenging where parents were not really allowed to come in and spend a lot of time visiting their children and my brothers could never come in and visit and so you can imagine it was pretty stressful and a scary time for me and I think it's really wonderful that I don't remember all the details of that hospitalization but I have enough memories to be able to share with you that it was something that I would that gave me a lot of compassion for other what other people might feeling when they're in these kinds of situations but I really distinctly remembered one nurse who actually stopped and took the time to explain to me what was happening because things like someone coming in and drawing blood would happen and then the next day I noticed somebody becoming in and I'd have blood hanging and an infusion was happening and I really again at the age of five you don't understand why all those things are happening and so she really spent some time with me and explained to me what was happening and began to find some volunteers and young candy strippers that would spend time playing games and helping to divert my attention and give me some additional time to have company. She was extraordinary when I actually had a neighbor that was going to have her tonsils out and she made sure that she was placed in the bed across from where I was so I would again see a friend and have a friendly face to look at and be able to talk with her while I was still in the hospital.
Again when you're at five years of age it's a pretty frightening time especially when you don't have your parents being allowed to stay in the hospital and visit with you. So I really vowed at that time because I was so impressed with the time and the attention and hearing that she showed me that when I grew up I would be like her and I wanted to be able to help other people and make a difference. It's ironic that her name actually was Joyce and so I knew I'd never forget her name nor would I ever forget what she did for me when I was a child and you know I had a lot of people put pressure on me over time to try to look at perhaps becoming a teacher or look at some other profession and I was pretty stubborn about the fact that I wanted to become a registered nurse and I didn't ever really deviate from that. I was encouraged to spend time as a volunteer in a hospital.
I also took a course in high school to become a nursing assistant and I think my parents kept trying to figure out if this was really what I wanted to do and the more I got involved in healthcare the more I knew that that is in fact what I really wanted to do. So some people might think that you know I have a stubborn streak because I've never really gave up on that desire to become a nurse and I would say that that's accurate. I've always felt like this was the calling that I had and I've been doing this now for 40 years and I would choose to do this again if I had a chance to and was asked if I would do it all over again. So I think one of the things that I would also share is that I'm originally from Connecticut and I went to a diploma program which is a three year program and it was really interesting for me to start to find out that there really are a lot of different ways you can enter nursing and I had chosen a three year program at the time and we started to then have what were called associate degree programs are opening but also push for people to really go back to school and get a baccalaureate degree.
I really loved the program that I was in so I stayed in there and received a diploma back in 1975 and since then I will share with you that even though on the last day of clinicals in school I went open another book for a long long time because I had enough learning and the three years I was at school I went back to school for both my baccalaureate and my master's and most recently in 2010 completed my doctor of nursing practice degree and you might be wondering like why would you do that why would you go back to school and what difference does it make for people to have those advanced degrees. The way I would explain it is that it depends on the number of doors and opportunities that you want to have open to you in your career because many professional jobs in nursing do require certain levels of degrees and I started to look at job ads and realize that if I wanted to eventually move into perhaps an academic role or I wanted to go into an executive leadership role I would need more education and credentialing than what I currently had when I finished my diploma program. I would also share with you that I've had a tremendous opportunity to work in a variety of organizations and the first organization I worked in was this Harvard Hospital which was actually where I went to school and I stayed there for a little while and then I joined the United States Air Force site. I ended up being stationed in San Antonio, Texas at Lackland Air Force Base and I would share with you that being a military nurse was really quite different than the civilian practice and I learned a lot very quickly.
I also had the opportunity to really work with and see a lot of different kinds of cases that are probably more unusual on the civilian side than on the military side because people were air backed in from all over the country to Wilford Hall at the time. So the experience that I had and the opportunities to really grow and that's where I really started in my critical career were just phenomenal and had the wonderful opportunity to work with very dedicated people that were really committed to figuring out how to take care of people that had very complex needs and again experience things that were perhaps different because it came from different countries and it had different kinds of injuries that they had sustained. So after spending a couple of years in the Air Force though I decided that I really needed to get serious about going back to school and that's when I began to return to school from my baccalaureate degree and I tell people that when I went back to my bachelor's degree at the time the program was $25 for each of the two full-time semesters at UTL Science Center in San Antonio School of Nursing and I paid $50 basically for my BSN. But I'll share a little bit more with you about why going back to school was so important and what the various degrees and the doors that do open with those different levels after we take a break.
So again this is becoming live to you from BBM Global Network Intune and Radio. It's all about nursing and I'm Dr. Joyce Bachelors and it's time to take a short break. Dr.
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Get his book now online or by visiting thecultureofexcess.com. We are coming to you live from BBM Global Network Intune and Radio for all about nursing and Dr. Joy Spatchelor. Just before we took a break, I was sharing with you all a little bit of highlights about the career that I've had in nursing and how I decided to get into the profession and making that decision at the age of five.
One of the things that I was also discussing is when I went back to school, I had initially gone to a diploma program and I recognized that I needed to have some additional education because there were several different jobs that seemed like they would be appealing to me, but they were very clearly going to be requiring an advanced degree. I think that's one of the things that is unique about the profession and sometimes confusing to the public is that we have a variety of ways that you can become a registered nurse and there's a lot of different degree levels. And so for example, there's an associate degree nurse program, which is a two-year program at the I went to a diploma program that was a three-year program and most of those nursing schools have closed over time, but they still have some in certain parts of the country. People are really trying to push now more is for nurses to go back and really have a baccalaureate degree and that becoming more of the basic level of nursing degree that people need to have futuristically and then having more advanced degrees as a master's degree and or then going on for a doctoral degree and people might be thinking, oh my gosh, I didn't realize that nurses have all those different types of degree choices and also have those kinds of requirements.
But in fact, nursing is not just one certain kind of nursing. Nursing has so many different types of roles and settings that you can practice in and the requirements and the expertise and the specialization is probably something that a lot of people do not understand. And just like physicians specialize and become cardiologists or neurologists or neurosurgeon, nurses have those kind of specialization as well when they're taking care of patients and they really understand those kinds of types of diseases, processes and specialties as much as physicians do. We've also begun to see a lot of nurses going back to school, become advanced practice nurses and there's quite a few nurse practitioners that end up working not only in local hospitals and cities, but many serve as really key people to provide access to care out in rural communities and underserved areas so that care can become easier for people to access more affordable and we can assure that people are going to get the care when they need it and hopefully doing things more preventively rather than waiting until they have a very serious illness or problem.
So I went back to school again for my baccalaureate to retain my master's and I was very fortunate at the time because I had spent two years in the Air Force that I was eligible for some reimbursement with the GI Bill and that was really very helpful because I was trying not to work full time but I pretty much did the entire time I was going back to school. But having that additional reimbursement was very helpful. Once I finished my baccalaureate degree I really felt like I needed to continue on and so I did. I started with the master's program in San Antonio and I really found it to be extremely valuable and I was really able to start seeing how I could really apply the additional knowledge and skills for the areas that I really wanted to be working in.
Most of my experience as a staff nurse was really in critical care and I had a tremendous love for critical care nursing in particular working on the surgical side and specifically with cardiovascular surgery patients and I really spent a lot of time specializing with my knowledge in that area and then I ended up realizing that I needed to my I ended up moving to Northern Virginia and so when I went to that different area I found that there were a lot of master's perinersis so it was a bit harder to break into that market in what I really had wanted to do which is become a cardiovascular clinical nurse specialist. There were no jobs like that in Northern Virginia so I remember taking a staff nurse job working in critical care and then a nursing director position came open and I thought okay well I guess I could try this and see what it's like but I had never really thought about bone into leadership because I really loved taking care of patients and it was a hard decision because once you do that you feel like you're moving a little bit further away from the bedside and I had to really do some reflection on that and what I realized is that the opportunity to impact patient care could actually be greater because I was in fact going to have an opportunity to impact things at a different level in a nursing director role. So that was my first job was to become a nursing director of a step down progressive care unit and began to really work with and develop the skills that I needed in order to really lead some very amazing and talented nurses and I would share with you that it was very intimidating initially especially when I had to post my first schedule that I made for the staff realizing that I was really impacting their lives by the way I put them on the different schedule and different shifts and I think the first time I posted a schedule I went to lunch because I was afraid that I probably had made some people mad and you always do because you can't make everybody happy but I started to learn sometimes the hard way how to become a better leader and really be able to influence patient care in the organization that I was working with and I had a tremendous compassion for really trying to not only do a good job taking care of the patients but to really develop the staff because I really could see and I think it's one of the talents that I've had over time how to really unleash people's potential and really coat nurses on how to really take on greater challenges and things that they perhaps don't even believe that they are capable of doing but I know that they can especially with the right coaching and expertise that I and or my other people in the organization could provide them and so I really started to enjoy working in the leadership side and I began to look at after being a nursing director for a period of time if I wanted to move into a more senior role and ironically I started in a position when I was in charge of what was called an administrative position where I was in charge of different special projects and one of them was to really look at doing an assessment of the nursing care in the critical care areas of a particular hospital I was working in and I really enjoyed that opportunity and as I started to then actually become in charge of all the critical care units I again began to really realize that I needed to continue on my leadership journey and learning additional skills and knowledge in order to really take an effectively impact the care as well as the environment that the staff were working in so that they could really come to work every day and make a difference in people's lives and I have to be worried about where they had adequate supplies and linens and things like that that we now call hunting and gathering that can be really annoying and waste a lot of time rather than be able to spend it with patients and so that was I think an exciting time in my career and I really enjoyed working on in that arena because again critical care has always been my first love I liked the intensity I liked the opportunity to really be critically thinking working very collaboratively with other professionals and having a more involved relationship with patients because people come into the nursing profession because they really care about people and I think that was one of the things that I wanted to make sure is that I could really allow people to have a good setting to work in so that they could really feel good about the work that they were doing so again this is all about nursing and I'm Dr. Joyce Bachelors and we're live on BBM Global Network and tuning radio and it's time to take a short break we'll be right back.
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Joyce Batchelor, the host of the show. Again, I'm really excited that we're launching this show this week because it is National Nurses Week and I just want to say Happy Nurses Week to all the nurses that may be listening to this and those that may be in nursing school planning to come into the profession. I was sharing before the break a little bit about why some of the different things that I have done in my career as a nurse and one of the things that I was talking about was moving away from being a bedside clinical nurse to moving into leadership and the discernment process that I had to go through because it really did take me more away from direct care with patients and that was very hard to give up. But I had the opportunity to really realize that I could really make an impact on patient care to a greater degree in a leadership position by really helping to work on having a great environment for staff to work in so that the care that they could deliver would be done in a very caring and comprehensive way.
And so I had a nursing director position and a couple of different organizations before I moved into a higher executive leadership role and again when I moved into that higher executive leadership role I had another period of discernment trying to figure out if that was really what I wanted to do. And for a period of time when I had first moved into a leadership role I would sometimes on a weekend work as an agency nurse in another hospital in the area just to keep up my clinical skills and I kind of tell people that it's the story of before children and after children because I could do that before I had children. Once I had my daughter I was not able to do that she was my second full time job. And so I had actually earned my CCRN which is a certification in critical care nursing that really does signify that you have a certain level of competency in critical thinking capability in critical care and I was extremely proud that I had been able to achieve that.
Well part of the requirement is that you have to work a certain number of hours in order to really maintain that which I think is a really wonderful thing so that when the public sees people that have these different kinds of specialty certifications they can really be comforted with the fact that these are nurses that really have very specialized knowledge and skills and critical thinking skills in particular and they should feel confident and be able to be having that nurses will provide for them. And so that was one of those decisions that again sort of had to do some thinking if I wanted to really move in that direction. But again I took that leap of faith and began to work in more of an executive leadership role. It then took me to a really big decision that I had to make in my career which is when I was called to come to Austin, Texas and take a look at a job by a person that had been a chief operating officer at the hospital I had been working at.
And I really wasn't sure I wanted to move from Northern Virginia area to Austin, Texas but I decided to come and look at the facility and learn more about the job. And it ended up being I guess a good point in my career because my daughter was not quite five and my son was about two years of age and if I was going to make a move it would be better to do that before my children had started school. And so I took again a major leap of faith making the move and changing positions and relocating to a place where I really didn't know anybody. And that was again you know one of those things where you're happy that you as a nurse do have a lot of professional colleagues to call on because one of the things that you find in this profession is that there's a lot of situations that come up sometimes that you wonder how do I do this or what should I do in this situation and having a network of colleagues to reach out to is extremely important.
And my network was pretty well established in the Northern Virginia DC area and Maryland area as a whole. But I made the choice to move to Austin, Texas and that's really where I ended up spending the last number of years since 1994. I've been here and I spent all over 19 and a half years as a system chief nursing officer. And I think that that role really has been the highlight of my career.
I had an opportunity to work with some of the most amazing nurses and leaders to really make a difference in patient care and a much grander scheme that I would have ever dreamed I would have been doing when I made a decision to become a nurse at HVIVE. And so I think that being able to really show that there are people now that are staff nurses that are continuing the staff nurse role and they're just doing extraordinary work and doing nursing research and really making a difference in people's lives is very rewarding. I also started to see nurses that were interested in other specialties really coming forward and wanting to pursue different pathways. And that's something that maybe the public doesn't always understand.
But there are specialties within nursing in terms of working in critical care or surgery or the perinatal area, mummies and babies or the neonatal ICU and the medsurg units that have a lot of specialties within them. And I think that besides the clinical nursing, there's also the opportunity to move into the leadership track and also to move in to become an educator as well as now nursing informatics are really in high demand as we have more technology coming in to help care in the electronic health care world. And so I think that the thing that made me really proud is when I started to see a lot of the staff nurses really becoming involved in helping to make decisions and shaping the care that was being delivered. And then they started to move into other roles that they had a passion for and that they could become my successors in terms of people that could take on new leadership roles and do a really dynamite job and have the right kind of philosophy where again it's really more in a servant leadership role to really try to create a wonderful environment for nurses to work in.
I had growing up, my family is Italian all my background and my dad was rather strict and I was teasing him one day and told him that one of my leadership capabilities is that I know how to get around obstacles and how to always have contingency plans and I credited him being so strict that I as a teenager had a finger out contingency plans because I sometimes wanted to get around some of the rules that I had to live under as I lived under his roof. And so I think that having those kinds of opportunities though to really be able to look at how do you make a change because when I first started leadership nobody tells you how to be an effective leader. You sometimes learn the hard way and again counting on having peers and colleagues that are going to help you when you're in different situations and sometimes just be a sounding board. So I've been very blessed to have some amazing mentors and colleagues that have really assisted me over time and who are there to help support me was I was trying to navigate through different sorts of challenges that I would find myself in in in a leadership role.
And so I think hopefully you're hearing that there's just a whole lot of different opportunities and pathways that one can go in this profession and so we'll talk more about this. But first of all we're going to be moving to a break and again you're listening to All About Nursing Live from BBM Global Network and Tune Radio and I'm Dr. Joyce Bachelor. We're an Asants Woman, Trailblazer, Maverick.
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You're listening to All About Nursing Live from the VBM Global Network and TuneIn Radio and I'm Dr. Joyce Batchelor, the host of this show. Before the break I was telling you a little bit about my highlights of my career in nursing and I was sharing with you some highlights of moving into a leadership role and again I made a decision at the age of five that I wanted to become a nurse and stayed pretty straight on that pathway for the entire time I was in school. I've been in this role, I've been in the profession now for over 40 years and I've had a variety of different roles that led me to eventually moving into a senior executive position after being in the field for about 15 years.
And the thing that I really would like to stress again is that when you hear nursing, nursing is a broad term that encompasses a whole lot of different kinds of specialties as well as roles and credentials and requirements that individuals have to meet in order to really do these different kinds of positions that you find yourself being interested in. I think the general public is very much aware of the hospital nurses and people that take care of them but nurses really in order to do all of that are working in a variety of different roles to really try to impact the care. So again, I think one of the highlights of my career was when I was serving as a chief nursing officer for a multi-hospital system and had the honor to work with so many talented individuals who were really very dedicated to improving the care of the people that we served. And it was a mission-based hospital so it was systems so that it really resonated for me that you take care of everybody no matter what their ability to pay is.
And I think a lot of nurses are like that because we certainly don't check to see who has insurance or not when we first begin to take care of people. We come into the profession to take care of people no matter who they are and no matter where they live and what their circumstances might be. And so I would also share with you that when you move into these positions there really is again additional education, training and new competencies that you have to gain. And I think that I really again ate my words that when I finished my last clinical day of my diploma program that I would never open up another book I had a really come to terms with the fact that learning is lifelong and I had to learn how to learn because it wasn't going to go away.
And healthcare has changed so much that you have to really keep up. And so there's a lot to really that you need to do in order to be successful in the nursing profession. And so I had again gone back to school, got my back to work degree, my master's and then most recently my doctor of nursing practice degree in 2010. And so one of the things that I would also share with you is that in a leadership role it's really like how you inspire other people to go back to school to want to advance their knowledge and skills because education does matter.
And the profession of nursing can be a little tricky sometimes because we have a variety of ways that nurses can start in the profession. For example, we have an associate degree nursing program, diploma program, which is what I went to initially, baccalaureate and then the more advanced degrees with master's and doctorate degrees PhD's and also now doctorate nursing practice degrees. So when people say I'm a nurse, it's a pretty encompassing term and there really are a lot of specifics within which you might meet different people that have different roles and they work in different settings and they may in fact be leading work that's very surprising to you as a general public. But the profession of nursing is I think a wonderful profession if you're considering thinking about becoming a nurse because there are so many diverse opportunities that you can choose from.
And I always say to people if you're getting bored, talk to me. I have plenty of opportunities that I think I could help you look at if you in fact want to do something different and you feel like you are ready for a change. And that's really, as a leader I used to think, this is wonderful. Staff have so many opportunities and chances to do different things and there's different roles that they can choose from.
And I want to really help grow and develop them to support them doing that. And at the same time, oh my gosh, here I come. I have another resignation. I've got to replace this nurse.
But part of the satisfaction that you get as a leader is when you do have people that leave you for those kinds of reasons that it does make you feel good because you help that person find what their niche is and what they really have strengths in and what they would really like to be successful in. And you help them get there. So that helps to make it a little bit easier when you get that letter that someone wants to transfer from your area or they want to resign because staffing is always a challenge that a staff leader spent a lot of time on. So as I began in my chief nursing officer role and working with the staff, I just really found that it was very rewarding to see individuals going back to school.
And I was really proud of how many times they would just take the initiative to really begin to work together to really facilitate going back. Because if you haven't been in school for a while, it can be kind of intimidating to return and realize that you're going to have tests again or you have to have presentations and different kinds of homework assignments. And I would find though that a lot of the nurses would find out who was going back to school and who was going to go to school at programs. And they would get together and form their own study groups so that they could have their own support group.
And in turn, which find out other people that might be going to school and start to share books. And there's such camaraderie to really support people trying to do go back to school to get a more advanced degree. So I've been really pleased and very fortunate to work with so many talented individuals. I served in that role for over 19 and a half years and just had the most incredible experiences working with so many wonderful people and the impact that we could have on the patients that we served.
I kind of tease people now that I'm not really retired. What I'm doing is what I call my preferment stage of life. I'm at a place where I really only choose to do things I prefer to do, things that I'm really enjoying. And it's taken a while to kind of get here and to be in a situation where I can do this.
But I really have found that the strengths that I have are really being spent now on helping to develop others, to do a lot of executive coaching. I teach in the DMP program now at Texas Tech where I went to school and I really enjoy working with the students. I learn as much from them as I think they learned from me. It's just an amazing opportunity.
And I have been working with different hospitals in a consultative role and really trying to sometimes just give them different ideas and help with assessments to help them figure out how to influence big changes because health care is undergoing massive changes right now. There's so much uncertainty and still so much debate about the Affordable Care Act and getting people covered or people not having coverage. And yet we know that we take care of people when they come in, no matter where they come from. And sometimes it's really concerning that we don't have enough care going to people before they come to us with really severe diseases.
And so I think you'll find that, again, there are nurses working in a variety of settings trying to really help facilitate and improve access to care and have care become more affordable. So I've been very fortunate to work with different companies and different organizations that are really trying to come up with innovative ways to meet the needs and their communities very differently. One of the things that I had the most amazing fortune was being selected as a Robert Wood Johnson Executive Nurse Fellow back in 2010. And it was three years of really intense coaching, executive coaching and fellowship with a lot of other colleagues that were from a variety of different practice settings.
And we were really being taught to think big, to think beyond the four walls of the hospitals that we worked in or the college that you worked in or whatever practice setting people came from. And they were very intentional about having people from a variety of fields of nursing so that you really began to think in a bigger way. And they really, their goal was for us to learn how to really impact and change health care and make it better. And so I've had the wonderful opportunity to work with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation both on really advancing what we talk about in terms of the future of nursing but also looking at how to create a culture of health.
So again, this is a, this is a, you're listening to all about nursing from the BDM Global Network, YouTube and radio and I'm Dr. Joyce Batchler, the host of the show. And we're going to go to break. So stay tuned.
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Welcome back everyone. You're listening to All About Nursing Live from the BBM Global Network and Tuning Radio. I'm Dr. Joyce Bachelor, the host of this show.
Before the break, I was telling a little bit about the wonderful opportunity I had when I was selected as a Robert Wood Johnson exec, or nurse fellow, back in 2010. And the challenges and opportunities that they wanted us to take a look at making a difference in when it came to advancing the healthcare for all. So the fellowship was three years long, and we would come together about twice a year and have some very intensive leadership development and really begin to have our thinking stretched in terms of spanning our boundaries and beginning to figure out how to impact patient care in a much bigger picture than we perhaps were used to doing in our day-to-day jobs. And through this opportunity, I've had the fortune of working with the foundation as we have taken on looking at a report called The Future of Nursing that was created from the Institute of Medicine that's really been focused on certain areas like nurses going back to school and having a goal of 80% of our nurses having a baccalaureate degree by 2020, really looking at how do we make sure that nurses are working to the full extent of what they're trained in.
And this isn't just for advanced practice, it's for all nurses that they're really using their critical thinking skills and the kinds of education and training that they have received so that they're able to again make sure that they're doing the higher level thinking and caring for the people that they take care of. It's also been very wonderful to work with them as they've been starting to expand beyond the IOM report and really looking at how do you then take when you have a more educated trained nursing workforce and start to have people deployed to really looking at creating a culture of health. And so that's where a lot of emphasis is now going in terms of how do we do more preventative care, how do we assure that people have access to care at again at a convenient, affordable rate so that you can prevent a lot of illnesses later on in life. And we've had forums where we've done a lot of brainstorming and bringing the best minds together to take a look at.
For example, how do we start to tackle the issue of obesity in this country, especially in children, and trying to have people become more active. You hear a lot these days about how sitting down and not being active is like another secondhand smoke in terms of the kinds of issues that it can cause disease-wise later on in life. And I'm really beginning to look at too, you know what can we do to really assist like children in different neighborhoods, being able to make sure that there's opportunities to be able to play outside, get that physical activity in. We know how important that is.
And I think we're starting to see organizations moving in the direction of incentivizing their employees, for example, to have healthier habits. And so I think the changes are going to take a while for us to really make some significant differences in, but it's been pretty exciting and continues to be an opportunity to greatly influence how care can be delivered in a different way. And I think on some of the shows that we'll have in the future, you'll get to hear from people that are involved in some of this exciting work and learn more about the diversity of places that nurses are currently working and the kinds of things that they're working on and the difference that they're making in their local communities. Because that truly is where some of this is going to end up happening.
It's not going to be something that we wait for the national government to come in and help us fix. I think what's going to be done in each of the communities with the people that are living there really coming together and trying to tackle the issues. I would encourage you to go on the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation website. They have some really amazing reports and things that you can read.
And you can also hear some stories about things that are being done in communities. If you're in a position where you would like to, and you're not a nurse, that's great. You can learn about ways that partnerships can set up to really start looking at improving things in your community. And a lot of the push really is to have business owners along with health professionals working together to address what we know are the social determinants of health.
And there's a report that they have on their website that is around the kind of health and your life expectancy is very much tied to the zip code that you live in. And so I would encourage some of you, if you're interested, to really go out on their website and read that report and look at the zip code you live in and start to check it out to see what they say about the area that you currently are residing in. And I think that, again, the reason I'm sharing this is that there's a lot of work going on that nurses and others are working together to try to look at how to make changes because we know that there are some neighborhoods where if it's not a safe place to go outside and play, then children are not going to be able to get the physical activity they need, trying to look at how do you assure that there's healthy fruits and vegetables and things available in walking distance rather than what you tend to find is that it's a long walk to get to a store that's got healthy foods, but you can certainly find stores with chips and sodas and candy and things that are not necessarily going to be very healthy for the kids and others that are eating that stuff today. So the work with the foundation, again, has just been incredible because it's really challenged all of us that have been in that fellowship to continue to really look at ways that we can think much more creatively and bring in other partners to really assist.
So even when we started to work on the Institute of Medicine report on the future of nursing, we have business partners that are at the table with us to really assist us in looking at some of the challenges and things that we're trying to do. It's very hard for people sometimes to go back to school because financially if they're particularly a single parent and they have to work, there's childcare expenses, it's difficult. We're trying to figure out if there's creative ways to assist people because it's important for us to have our nurses going back to school, but how do you make it affordable as well as how you make it accessible when you look at, for example, I live in Texas, it's a huge state and there's a lot of rural areas that there are no schools around and so how do you perhaps figure out how to use online program capabilities that a lot of universities and other programs are offering today. So that is again, it's easy for people to go back to school because as I was sharing earlier, it does matter to the kinds of degrees and the kinds of certifications and experiences people have really to allow you to have certain doors open or not if you're not able to meet those requirements.
So again, you're listening to all about nursing live from BBM Global Network and Tuning Radio and I'm Dr. Joyce Bachelor and we're going to take a break, so stay tuned. Are you looking for employment in the Los Angeles Orange Riverside and San Bernardino counties? Jobs and exits are placed for you.
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our Welcome back everyone. You're listening to All About Nursing Live from the BBM Global Network and TuneIn Radio. I'm Dr. Joyce Batchelor the host of this show.
Before the break, I was telling you a bit about the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the incredible work that they are doing and the report that they have online that is called, how to know what your health is like by looking at your zip code and it really has a lot of great information on the social determinants of health and things that we know we need to be fixing. And so you may want to go online and see if you can click in there and put your zip code in and see what kind of life expectancy is predicted for people living in the area that you're currently residing in. And the reason that I'm sharing that is that it's really what a lot of us in the nursing profession are doing is trying to work with other colleagues and business partners to see if there's innovative ways to meet the needs based on the communities that we are serving. Again live in the Texas, it's a big state, there's a lot of rural areas that kind of care that you can and cannot get really depends on where you live and the access to care can be a huge issue especially when people are living out in rural and underserved areas.
And so I think I've been in nursing now for over 40 years, the changes that I've seen are just incredible. I was sharing today because it's nurse this week and I had the opportunity to be a keynote speaker for an organization here in Texas and I was sharing with them that when I graduated nursing school the only mouse sign was the kind my cat brought home and there were no computers back then and I was required to bring a black, a red pen and a blue pen because we color coded by what shift we worked on and we also had the red pens that we could take the temperatures on a temperature record and connect the dots to see if the temperatures were staying within normal range and you think about today where the technology is, a lot of that is being automatically downloaded and electronic healthcare record off of different monitors and machines that we now have and how far we've come in terms of making improvements and really helping to do a better job of taking care of people. But all that said we still have more room for improvement and the cost of care in the US is still a concern and a lot of organizations are really working on how to bring those costs down and there are again a lot of innovative things that nurses are working on and I will have the opportunity on future shows to bring some guests on that will help showcase some of the different kinds of ways nurses are really trying to take on some of these challenges and make a difference in different settings and so I'm pretty excited about the opportunity to do that. I've shared a lot with you all tonight in terms of my background and the pathway that I've had and going back to school and probably many different things that you may not have been aware of and I'm hoping that this is helping to really peak your interest in learning that when we talk about nursing it's really a very encompassing term for a variety of fields and specialties that nurses are in and there's over 3.6 million of us celebrating National Nurses Week this week and I'm really excited that the show's been able to get launched on this very special week and again I look forward to sharing more not only about what I've been doing but to really have the opportunity to hear from other colleagues and next week I again will have Dr.
Bob Dent who is a wonderful colleague of mine and he's going to be sharing his thoughts about what it's been like to be a male in nursing and tell you a little bit about his career he's just doing phenomenal work and I think you'll really enjoy hearing from him. I will have other guests like that that that I think you'll really enjoy hearing from and maybe surprised by some of the things that nurses really are involved in and all I can say to you is that the work that nurses do every day is extraordinary and not everybody can do this job it's not always easy sometimes it's very complex and challenging position to be in there's certainly challenges that nurses are working on today that we never had to really think about or worry about in the past but you know I would say that people are still extremely committed to caring for others and I'm really proud that I am able to tell you that I am a nurse and I've been one for now over 40 plus years so again this is you've been listening to all about nursing live from the BBM Global Network and Tune in Radio and Dr. Joyce Bachelor the host of this show and I hope that you'll tune in next week stay tuned. Welcome to all about nursing with your host Dr.
Joyce Bachelor executive nurse. You've been listening to all about nursing with your host Dr. Joyce Bachelor Tune in each week and get a daily dose of nursing and the health care services they provide and how the nurses are finding innovative ways to address the key health care issues they're facing today. Here on Dr.
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