Education :
- 2 years pre-nursing at the Ohio State University
- 3 years at Mount Carmel College of Nursing
- Received a Bachelor of Science in Nursing
I am a clinical manager for Neurosurgery and Orthopedics. That means
that I oversee the daily operations for these two servicelines in
surgery. I keep up with the inventory of supplies, maintain the monthly
budgets and oversee the nursing staff that works these two areas of
surgery. I review the surgery schedule and the people that will work
them to make sure we have the appropriate equipment and staffing. Since
I oversee about 34 people, I have to do 34 staff evaluations every year,
one for each person that works for me. This means evaluating their
performance, discussing it with them and setting up goals for them to
work on in the future. I'm also responsible for maintaining equipment
and meeting special needs of physicians. In addition to all of hose
duties, I will scrub in and act as the scrub nurse in the operating room
or be the circulating nurse.
 The best part of my job is seeing how the patients do after surgery. I will sometimes follow the progress of patients right up until they leave the hospital, especially those that I make a special connection to. There are always patients that impact you in a special way. You can tell you are doing a good job and making a difference in people’s lives by seeing how their lives change after their hospital visit. The worst part of my job is the paperwork and evaluating the people that work for me. HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) requirements put constraints on what information we can convey to patients and their families. HIPAA also creates a lot more paperwork.
I think the most exciting thing about my job is that no two days are the same. There is always something different going on. You can have the best-laid plans and it all comes to a screeching halt because of an emergency!
In the past ten years, tasks have become more specialized; nursing in general has become more specialized. You no longer have just a floor nurse. You now have a telemetry (monitoring and read out) specialist. There are pinpoint areas of focus for nurses, with more schooling and more specialized training required. I would imagine that trend would continue over the next ten years, with nurses becoming more and more specialized. Also, I think there will be more computerization to cut down on paperwork and speed up processes. At least I hope so – I’d really like to cut down on the paperwork!
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