Emory nursing faculty, alumni, students, and Decatur community members gathered at a favorite local watering hole, Brick Store Pub, late January to discuss their career paths, education, and how they would like to impact their fields and communities.
Our Nurse a Cocktail event invited over 30 individuals with various involvement in the field of nursing to come together and share their stories, struggles, and successes. Since our purpose at Ponce is to build culture and cultivate engagement within our community, we thought a gathering outside the building would be the perfect place to create some serendipitous collisions – and hopefully form new bonds within our facility.
To help facilitate new interactions amongst attendees, we created connection cards that participants had to fill out (by meeting someone they didn’t know!) in order to receive a complimentary cocktail. From there, we were able to uncover quite a bit about our community and a few common themes throughout the evening:
SCHOOLING AND SPECIFIC STUDIES
A majority of Emory students (and especially those present that night) tend to move toward the Doctor of Nursing Practitioner (DNP) degree, which can actually cause issues with the limits on how many students can participate in these programs.
Emory alumni, Jasmine Ryans, said that she got to take one simulation lab at the new 250 E Ponce space and said that the experience was "luxurious" compared to her other lab experiences.
OPPORTUNITIES AND OBSTACLES
Emory alumni, Noelle Pruitt, spoke with a current nursing student, Isabel Rumsey, about the importance of experiencing different hospitals and healthcare systems to be prepared for all opportunities.
Most nursing students that evening want to work at Grady Memorial Hospital, because of its Level 1 Trauma status – which is great for a resume.
However, what they are not told is that nurses have to work for two years prior to being able to transfer to Level 1 Trauma and even then they have to have certain scores in order to be considered for the transfer.
Nurses are facing certain challenges in obtaining the score due to technology issues that are not in their control. For example, nurses have a “scan score” which has to be a certain percentage (approximately 98-99 percent) when scanning prescriptions prior to administering to patients. The issue is that the scanners are not working sometimes and therefore they are unable to scan, which lowers their score.
BURNOUT
Many nurses are experiencing extreme burnout – something we also discussed at our International Nurses Day event in May 2022.
One attendee is considering leaving nursing altogether because of burnout and the difficulty of the demographic and stressors of working at Grady.
Omid Razmpour, a PhD student at Emory’s School of Nursing, is working on a thesis about nurse burnout and how to prevent it. Because Emory has an extensive database of information they collect from students and graduates, it has cut down on his research time and he hopes to complete it within three to four years instead of three to five.
ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Bryanna Marshall, an Emory graduate who went on to start her own company shared that “it's so hard to break into the tech world with a healthcare background, but I'm excited to be on this journey.”
Chelsea Shakleford, the Director of Alumni Engagement at Emory, has her own hot sauce company.
The following were answers to the connection card question: “What would your startup be?”
A school/program for educating the underserved
Business for vulnerable populations
Cats + Hats
Coffee shop
Eco tour
Ecotourism/travel
Entertainment venue
Health coaching
Hot sauce
Med spa
Parent coaching
Physical restraints for autistic patients
We also learned that several Emory faculty members were so appreciative of the evening’s festivities, as they feel there isn't a great opportunity to connect with one another, or the community. So, cheers to fostering even more connections in the future – and to our amazing nurses who do so much!