Empowering the Next Nurse Generation Workforce Through Education with Jennifer Wallace, Nursing Educator Professor: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

Empowering the Next Nurse Generation Workforce Through Education with Jennifer Wallace, Nursing Educator Professor: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Rebecca Love:
Hi everyone! This is Rebecca Love with Outcomes Rocket Nursing, and I am so excited to have my guest today, Jennifer Wallace, MSN, who is a Boston based academic and clinical nurse educator formerly at Lawrence Memorial Regis College and now moving to Bunker Hill Community College. She brings extensive clinical experience in a variety of very needle settings to this role. These include neonatal ICU, inpatient newborn and postpartum home care and the Community Health OB Education. She was awarded the 2019 Massachusetts Rhode Island League For Nursing Nurse Educator Scholarship, and in 2020 she obtained the National League for Nursing Certified Nurse Educator Credential. She was able to further her interest in innovation in teaching, learning in technology and nursing education as a member of SONSIEL's Inaugural Fellowship Program from 2019 to 2020, has an integrated innovation such as universal design for learning, design thinking for health care and open educational resources into the classroom, clinical and online course curricula. Jenn contributed to the Rebel Nurse Handbook, is one of the authors of the Inspirational Stories by Shift Disruptors which received the American Journal of Nursing's 2020 Book of the Year Awards. She has participated as a team lead, mentor and track lead for the health equity track during the nurse hack for health events and recently enjoyed learning, connecting and collaborating with other like minded rockstar nurses at the SONSIEL Drexel Nursing Innovation and Entrepreneurship Certificate Program. Jen, it is such an honor to have you on this show. You're one of our first nursing educators professors on the show, and I'm so excited to have you because I think the voice of the professor in nursing and those who are educating that next generation of nursing is so critical, especially with all the downward pressure of what we're seeing happening to our profession during COVID. So when we get started, tell me what inspires your work today?

Jennifer Wallace:
You know, I was excited that that was the first question that you were going to ask me. So I really kind of sat down and took a breath and thought about that. I've been fortunate to have a very long career, and I think what has inspired me has changed over time as I've grown as a person and grown as a nurse. But I think the two factors that have been consistent to inspire me have been my love of learning. That lifelong learning nursing has given me an opportunity to continually learn and grow. I just think that that really kept me going for a really long time. The second consistent inspiration for me throughout my career has been also being mentored and now having the ability to mentor. So if I can just share a little bit of my back story as I reflected about what's inspired me. When I was in high school, I was a housekeeper in a hospital. It was a tiny little community hospital near my home, and I was always asking the nurses questions. I worked on the weekends. I worked after school. My areas were the O.R., the E.R., Radiology. I was fascinated and I was forever like following the nurses pretending I was sweeping and asking them questions about what they were doing. And this was a while ago. It was pre-HIPAA. And I remember one weekend being in the O.R. and there was an emergency hip surgery happening and there was all this hubbub and I asked the nurses, Wow, what's happening? And they explained to me what was happening, and they said, do you want to go watch? That would never, ever, ever happen now. And they put me in O.R. scrub gear. It was on my lunch break and told me to go stand in the corner and don't say anything, and I was in there for maybe 15 minutes. And then they pulled me out and they took the time to explain to me what I had seen and why this person had to have surgery. And that was it. I was like, OK, I have to be a nurse. So upon graduation, I kind of knew and my parents knew I didn't have the maturity to kind of bite off college quite yet. So I enrolled in LPN Program through a regional vocational technical school. It was local. And it was free because a lot of grant money flowing then. And I went through an 18 month program. Shortly after I finished, I knew. I said, OK, now I'm really ready to bite off college. So I enrolled in a BSN program and all through my BSN program, I worked evenings and weekends as an LPN. So I was a young adult learner. Still had rent to pay. Car payment. Put food on the table, and I worked as an LPN on maternity unit, a well baby nursery in a postpartum unit at a small community hospital near where I was in college and the nurse manager took me under her wing, probably because I kept following her around asking questions and we would have the team from Boston come on. We had a sick baby and the NICU team to get the baby and that just really interested me. So whenever we'd have a team come, she positioned me with the team and said, You know where everything is, just go get them stuff if they need it. So one thing led to another. I ended up doing my senior practicum in a newborn ICU that hired me. After that, I was there for a little while. I went on to a newborn. I see you at the Brigham. I kept asking questions. I went to graduate school in my late twenties. I was the clinical specialist and an educator in the NICU with the Brigham for a while, still asking questions. And all along the way, the mentors that I sought out were kind of at a higher level than I was and just brought me along and I find in my role as an educator now, it's so exciting to be able to offer pay back that mentoring that I got to not only the students that are in my course, I teach maternity. So not only those students, but I've stayed in touch with our graduates who are now early career nurses who are very interested in maternity and or pediatrics, and still stay in touch with not only me, but our whole team reaching out not only for advice. And what we've found over the last year or so with COVID is they're not only reaching back for advice about a specialty, but they're reaching out for advice about how to manage during COVID. The stresses of being a brand new nurse during COVID, just a safe place to kind of vent and let off some steam.

Rebecca Love:
You know Jen, I love as you're talking because I think you started with saying that you love being a lifelong learner, and I think your journey shows how in nursing that is possible and how you don't have to stay where you start and you can grow and continue to educate and then you find yourself educating that next generation. And I think that inspiration is so critical to find what motivates you in nursing and you have found your home that learning constantly and then passing that knowledge forward is a value and a central focus to you. And I think that world for other nurses to hear that you know what, there are ways to stay involved and do things and finding your love of what that is makes nursing exciting and flexible. And there's a career path forward. So tell me, you know, you are working with a very, you know, a population of nurses that will graduate with what we would consider an associate degree level of nursing, which for the world I'm not sure if there's a good understanding, but there's a levels of RNs. There's associate degree level nursing, which is a two year degree. And then a BSN which is a four year degree. But they all become registered nurses. And I would wonder, Jen, if you could sort of explain a little bit about the associate degree nursing path and their power within nursing. And if you could sort of maybe just sort of explain sort of some of that setting for us and how associate degree nursing are adding value to the health care ecosystem, I think would be a real interest to the audience to sort of understand a little bit about that and what kind of impacts we're having in that space.

Jennifer Wallace:
I think that our program, like many two-year program, many associate degree programs, is an affordable, relatively quick way to become an RN. And as you pointed out, Associate degree nurses take the same licensure exam as do BSN nurses. And I think that an many two year programs like mine are just a lot more accessible than BSN programs for adult learners. And I think that many of the programs offer more flexibility as far as evening weekend programs like the one that I teach in. And I also believe that the best two year programs offer or have a relationship with a university that can offer a BSN because ultimately, here in the Boston area and across the country, a nurse with a BSN will have more opportunities, leadership opportunities, growth opportunities than a nurse with an associate degree. When after graduation, they can also take advantage of tuition reimbursement. So that's important. So I think circling back to your original question about the value that nurses who graduate from an associate degree program add, I think that many two year programs like mine attract a very diverse demographic of student culturally, language wise, gender wise, age wise, primarily adult learners, but coming from all different places. We have veterans. We have first generation students to college. We have men. And I think that for a long time, decades in fact, there's been a call to action to diversify the nursing workforce and ultimately increase the diversity of the nursing faculty workforce. It's been very slow. Progress has been very slow indeed. And the recent report The Future of Nursing 2020-2030 by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine renewed that call with an emphasis on that diversity, leading to and contributing to health equity and social determinants of health. So I think ultimately, by being able to put more nurses from diverse backgrounds out into health care, we are contributing to the health of not only individuals, but families, communities, society.

Rebecca Love:
Yeah, I love that, Jen, and I think you're right. I think that what we forget in this whole conversation of associate degree nursing and community college nursing is it really is designed for those later learners, those adult learners. And I remember I taught at Bunker Hill for over seven years, and I remember the vast majority of my classroom were these adult learners who had always dreamed of being nurses and knowing that both their life and work balances community colleges allowed them that flexibility to pursue a nursing degree and brought in so many people of different backgrounds and significantly higher numbers than we see in our traditional bachelor's programs, both of men and other races and backgrounds and immigrants and everybody who's just trying to live that American dream is often what I felt when I went in and taught at those colleges. So I love how you explained. You're absolutely right. There's different entry points and different benefits of both. But really, when you're looking at that associate degree community college program, it opens the door to a whole different level of learners that may not be traditional and in terms of being able to go into those traditional four-year programs. So tell us, what do you think that you're doing differently and better than what has been available in nursing education in the past? And how is it changing for the world?

Jennifer Wallace:
Well, I think that I consider myself so fortunate to have I won't really say fallen into it because I very proactively sought out SONSIEL. And I have been able to connect with many other nurse educators in our nursing community who are doing very similar work to me. But if I can kind of personalize it and talk a little bit about my interests around being different. One thing that has always for years bothered me was, I'm sure you've seen memes on social media about nursing school. Some of them are like one in a relationship with nursing school, meaning you don't have time for anything else in your life. No boyfriend, no husband, no kids. No sleeping late, nothing. You are in a relationship with nursing school, and there's a whole slew of them which are meant to be really funny and we do. It's great for us to poke fun at ourselves, but every time I would encounter one of those, a little part of my heart hurt. We are in a profession and we're growing nurses, so to speak, to contribute towards health, and it's not healthy to be in a relationship with nursing school. And we, I think our culture, we're making many strides, but again, very slow. I think nursing education has kind of pulled with it some outdated ideas from very medical model about clinical education, from our physician colleagues from long ago and what that unhealthy part of our culture keeps nursing students on the edge of their seats. It's very high stakes. It's very high stress. We nurse educators have been wrestling with a term called infobesity, which means there are so much information we are just trying to literally cram in before these students graduate, and we actively are working to just streamline that to kind of make it just pedagogically better learning. And I think that I had a daughter who went through nursing school. So I experienced that high stress not only with my students, but in my own home. And what I get really concerned about is adding COVID to this, and nurse educators are talking a lot about trauma informed teaching kind of a term we borrowed from our education colleagues, but our students are traumatized. Many of them work caring for COVID patients, have done many a few semesters now their whole nursing school in COVID and that they're graduating, they're taking NCLEX and they're jumping from a very high stakes, very high stress situation into a very high stakes, high stress Profession. And the burnout rate, I mean, you've talked about a lot the burnout rate of brand new nurses, and I worry that we're not giving nursing an edge to your programs for your programs oppportunity to reflect and breathe and sleep and rest and eat and be with their families. So I think what my mission is with whether it's learning strategies, whether it's my own content, I'm fortunate enough to work with a team and a program who really gets it. We're trying hard, but I think that's the value that I bring that mindset of changing the culture to one that's more healthy, you know?

Rebecca Love:
And I think that the culture of nursing is something that so many of us experience and and the story seem very similar. I have to tell you and and what to your point of what we do in the level of stress that our nursing students go into when they are in nursing school and then back out into that field? And the whole question to where are we graduating the nurses with the skill sets they need so that they will stay by the bedside? Do they have that education? And I have to tell you there's more and more, you know, systems, you know, so stuck in the past that they are not training them to be ready for that workforce and is that why we're seeing that? And I think that's a conversation that I think a lot of people are having, and it's good to hear that you guys are really focused on that pedagogy and how we make them more successful. And also that experience, because the truth is, is if we keep burning out nearly half of our new grads within two years, we are never going to make up for the loss that has happened during COVID and the accelerated rates of leaving the bedside. So that being said, you know, what do you wish that people knew about nursing that they might not know?

Jennifer Wallace:
I had to think about that for a minute? What do I wish people knew about nursing that they don't know? Well, I think there's probably a bigger picture, but if I can, I'd like to kind of bring it down to the experience of the nurse at the bedside now in 2021. I am a nurse at the bedside. Currently, I work very per diem, but I work per diem as a staff nurse. My daughter works full time as a staff nurse at a large academic medical center, and I'm in very close contact with my former students who are nurses. And I think that the public's expectation of their experience during hospitalizations is not in sync with what the reality of what nursing care can be given the current situation with resources and staffing. And what I'm seeing is that in hospitals, hospitals have to I mean, health care as a business hospitals have to put a good face on. We need marketing departments to draw people back to hospitals and health care to comfort them and know that the hospitals are safe places to go because people need hospital care for all kinds of things besides COVID. But I think that what I'm seeing and hearing are more stories about the public coming in for care and living the reality of not enough staff, not getting all their needs met. And the experience was not like one they may have had five or 10 years ago. And who is taking the brunt of it are is that very overworked, very stressed out, oftentimes very young nurse at the bedside. So I think if I could, if I could say anything to the public, I just have to say just be patient and have grace and understanding, and we are doing the best job that we can do to take care of you and your family.

Rebecca Love:
I think that's such a beautiful message, and I think that that is, you know, such an important point that what is that perspective of those that are living through this and the value that they bring and the under-resourcing that is happening and the burnout and the challenges and recognizing that is we as a community when we go in and we experience health care, how important nurses are and starting to champion more investment in support of them as a profession. Because when the rubber meets the road and you're standing on the front lines and serious injury or an acute episode that's dealing between life and death, you are going to need that nurse to be there. So thank you for sharing that, Jen, and I think that we as nurses have lived through interesting times. All of us in our careers, we've witnessed things that seem insurmountable or overly challenging or impossible to resolve or fix. Could you tell us, though, a time when you have witnessed your nursing team or nursing students provide a great solution to a problem?

Jennifer Wallace:
Yeah, that was a fun question to think about. So one example that I would like to share with you is a project that my colleagues, my faculty, colleagues and I worked on last summer. So Summer of 2020. So we had all experienced students and faculty alike had experienced the spring semester of 2020, the dreaded COVID semester, when we all on March 15th overnight shifted to remote learning and had all of the challenges of technology and COVID and more technology and Zoom meetings and everything shifted. It was incredibly stressful for all of higher ed. So we had spent, my faculty colleagues and I had spent that summer kind of figuring out how to move content online and all kinds of stuff. So we went through, we decided as a team we would do some professional development during the summer to up our skills as far as technology and online pedagogy because we just didn't know what the fall was going to bring. And we had gotten the message in the summer that come fall because of COVID safety protocols, we would be teaching hybrid classes so some students would be in the classroom and some would be on zoom. And this was done for social distancing and all the important COVID safety protocols. And we started thinking about what would that be like in the classroom for the students to only ever see our masked faces with face shields on? And we thought, what a barrier to the students getting to know us. What a barrier to they're learning. What a barrier to our teaching. So we thought and thought. As part of this professional development program, which was taught by educational specialists in online pedagogy, instructional designers outside of our nursing silos kind of exciting to be connecting with other people, doing similar work and taking that back to nursing education. So we learned about welcome videos and we created a welcome video. We each did a very short introduction to our to who we were, our name or background, a little bit personally about ourselves, just with our phone three or four minute video. I learned about some cutting and editing, screencastemetic and Youtube, and we put together a very short five minute video with us unmasked no face shield out in our yards where it was green and friendly and we welcome the students. We told them a little bit about ourselves and what they could expect from the course, you know, very short. And we sent it out before the semester started and we got such great feedback. We knew those students were going to be coming in traumatized still from that spring semester. And we knew that these students not only were bringing that residual trauma in, but they were students who worked full time. So they had worked full time over the summer. Many of them on COVID units. We knew that some of them had brought COVID back to their young families and their whole families had gotten infected. We knew that they individually, some of them have had personal challenges, whether that was trouble paying the mortgage, whether that was trying to homeschool their own children, caring for elderly relatives. So we were just so excited about this, and so much so that we've continued to use that for the next two semesters after that. So it was it was great. We presented it at an academic poster session and got a lot of also great feedback about it.

Rebecca Love:
Know what I love about hearing about when you talk about nursing students, they come in problems so differently than those who've been in the field. They see the potential and the opportunities and not limited in their way that they go about thinking that they can do something about the problems that they're seeing. And I love that you are embracing that and fostering those kind of opportunities for nursing students to do this. And then you elevate it further by taking them to present on it, because that is that is what is the brilliance and the opportunity for a profession is the opportunity to empower that next generation to believe that they are capable of driving change and solving problems that they actually experience and not handing that to somebody else to solve. And I think we as a profession need to own those solutions. And so I'm just thrilled that you're teaching that you're bringing these in and that you're empowering those nursing students to think differently and actually get out there and solve them. So thank you for doing that because I don't think that existed when I was in nursing school. And it's so exciting to see that it's starting to exist in nursing school today. So that gives me such hope. And you have had, as you said, a long career in nursing you. You went to becoming an LPN and then you went on to keep pursuing your nursing careers and now you're teaching that. I think that for some that are in the trenches today, they're experiencing challenges. They think that sometimes life just happens differently for other people and that the road is easily paved for them. But I was hoping, you know, with this time and everything that you're seeing, could you express a time that you know, you experienced a setback in your career or in your life that almost derailed what you thought was possible? And what was that key to learning and insight that kept you going? And that can help perhaps inspire others who might be experiencing setbacks in their life to realize that it's not the moment of that pain and suffering that define what you eventually will do. So can you talk to us a little bit about that?

Jennifer Wallace:
Sure. I guess first I'd like to say I think I have led a very blessed life. I have had very few major setbacks or what we want to call them. And I think the ones that I have had, I am very much of the of the mindset that life happens. Life happens in life and life happens in academia and life happens at the bedside and it's all part of life. So I don't really think I have one big, profound message or advice that I can give. But what I would like to share is one time recently professionally where I was very disappointed, so disappointed, and how with the support and help of some sensible colleagues, I was able to kind of rally. So it's nothing profound, but it's definitely an opportunity here I could take a breath and redirect, which I think is a great lesson for all of us at the bedside or in the classroom. So it was around the time of the first nurse hackathon. You know, there was a lot of energy around SONSIEL, a lot of energy around the hackathon. It had been on my calendar for months and then our schedule for the clinical weekends came out, was published and I looked at the calendar and wanted to cry because I was working. I was with students at the hospital for the whole weekend and there was no opportunity at all for me to join our SONSIEL colleagues in New Jersey, and I just wanted to cry. So after a few days of feeling like, Oh, why did I think I could do this? Why did I think I could be a nurse innovator? Oh, just forget it. I'm just, you know, too much work. I just woke up one day and said, No, that's crazy. I am going to make my own little mini hackathon. So I knew that that particular weekend was the last weekend that I would have this group of students. So I knew at that point they will have completed their maternity rotation. So they have a lot of good information and experience at that point. So they had enough content, enough information to be able to kind of chew on it. So we had just learned in our fellowship about design thinking for health care and the Marian Leary's The Design Thinking for Health Care website had just been published or just been released, and I spent some time with that and I created I designed this mini hack for my students, for the last afternoon of their clinical rotation and maternity, and I brought in Legos and poster board and markers and post-it notes everywhere. And that website really just guided me step by step by step. And I had a few last minute questions so literally at 10 o'clock at night, I was on my phone the night before that clinical day with Joanna Selzer and Rachel Acker when they were at the train station in New Jersey, and I said, I need some help, guys, I bounce some ideas off. They gave me some feedback. I said, Thank you so much. I'm good to go. And it was so much fun. And I think what those students left with was the the topic that they were kind of working on was caring for women and babies when there is substance misuse during pregnancy and neonatal abstinence syndrome. We had seen a lot of that during that rotation and they came up with alternative models and we took them through each stage of the design thinking website. We put music on. We had pizza and we spent a few hours doing it, and at the end they had these prototypes for new models of care. And I said, You guys look at what you've done. As nurses, many times bedside nurses feel powerless. They feel like I can't innovate. What is that? Other people do that? I have no power to be able to do that. But you know, I think that in with an activity like that, it really helped me to see that it is possible to kind of integrate innovation into an activity that fits it, aligns with learning outcomes. It fits in with curricula. It's fun. It's joyful. They were so proud of their work. Not really a setback, but it was so cool. I had to share it.

Rebecca Love:
I love that you took a moment that you said, Hey, you know what? I've missed this. I can't participate and you made one of your own, and I think that's the power of that and that you paid it forward to those and created those things. I think we all know the power of what hackathons do for us on a personal level and what it does for those. So I love how you took that experience in saying, you know what? That's OK, I'm going to create this, and I think that's the power of what everybody who's listening here to here is, you know, sometimes these moments that you miss is that you simply need to create them in your own space. Don't let the lack of being somewhere define your ability to possibly recreate that experience for others. And I think that's a powerful lesson that many of us in life can take not just beyond hackathons, but beyond our personal life of those experiences that we get should see those as just new opportunities. So, you know, Jen, as we are wrapping up here and coming to the end. Tell me, what are you most excited about today? I mean, you're living through those things. You're educating that next workforce, and you've talked about a lot of really challenging situations. But what gives you hope for the future?

Jennifer Wallace:
I think what gives me hope for the future, well, a lot of things give me hope for the future. I'm an eternal optimist, even in times like these. But one of the things that I am super excited about is the possibility of where the virtual reality simulation in nursing education. There are a number of programs across the country that have instituted immersive virtual reality simulation and have been doing it even pre-COVID. And COVID, just like upped the opportunity. And I think that for two reasons, it's just really exciting for me to kind of see what people are doing and like on social media on LinkedIn. It's incredible the connections that people are making, and I think that there's so much good that could come of that technology for a few reasons. I think that as I think about my the population of students that I teach going forward, we are going to need to have curricula that are flexible, adaptable, portable and can't be dependent on a place because there's going to be times when we're not going to all be able to be together. And nursing students have to meet clinical our requirements as per our boards of nursing. And so this is a technology that would give nursing students the opportunity to really in a very psychologically safe environment to be able to practice those skills. And we talk a lot about the promotion of clinical reasoning and clinical judgment. And it's just like, I just can't stop reading about it and talking about it with people.

Rebecca Love:
I love it. And then I am so glad that you were here with us because I think to your point, there are so many new, exciting things that are coming down the pipeline. And with everything that happened with COVID, there are Still what it showed is that in the breakdowns of those moments when things failed us, it was those times that allowed us to have new opportunities. And I think that your perception on the world and the pulse of student nurses and on on our academia session, and also the value of what that next generation is going to bring to the table and also you uncovering some really important points from the important role of community colleges and educating their workforce and the diversity that it brings, but also that downward pressure of what are we graduating them into and do we give them our new nursing graduates enough space to breathe our conversations that that deserve more attention in future understanding? So if people wanted to reach out to you, they want to find you. How? How can they find you? Where can they connect with you?

Jennifer Wallace:
Probably the easiest place is LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a great community. I encourage my students, my colleagues at the bedside to kind of jump right in, even if it's just reading articles for a while. So I'm on LinkedIn a lot. That's the easiest place to find me.

Rebecca Love:
So Jen Wallace on LinkedIn. You can find your her, she's based out of Massachusetts, currently moved over to Bunker Hill Community College. As she said, there is such an incredible, beautiful, incredible community of nurses and other individuals that you can connect with on that platform, and it is so omportant for us to connect. And the truth is is the power of those connections. You never know what's going to happen next in your life and the person you're going to meet. And it's like people that I've met, like Jen Wallace, who give me hope that the future of that next generation of nurses is going to change the world and thank you for all that you do, Jen, and to the world who tuned in to Outcomes Rocket Nursing, thank you for being here, where we interview some of the most interesting and innovative nurses in the United States, and around the world. And thank you for supporting those nurses when you do see them and being here today. Tune in again with us in the upcoming weeks of Outcomes Rocket. Jen Wallace, thank you for being here today with us.

Jennifer Wallace:
Thank you very much. It's been super fun.

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