UW Health Careers HomeAn Interview with Julie, RN
"There is one thing that UW Hospital and Clinics will provide a nurse and that's a challenge. And I love a challenge." - Julie, RN
Q: Julie, what do you do for a living?
A: I'm a registered nurse in the Cardiothoracic Intensive Care Unit and I work at UW Hospital and Clinics in Madison.
A: I'm a registered nurse in the Cardiothoracic Intensive Care Unit and I work at UW Hospital and Clinics in Madison.
Q: Tell me about your career.
A: I started working at UW in 1988. I left in 1990 and moved to Illinois and worked in a Cardiothoracic Surgical Intensive Care down there for a year and a half. In 1992, I went back to UW and worked in the Trauma Unit for a year and a half until an opening came again in the Cardiac Surgical Intensive Care.
I went back there, worked there for 2000, and had a child, and thought maybe it would be nice to try to get a job closer to home that didn't involve the weekend and holidays. So I took a clinic job that was only three miles from my house and that lasted for four-and-a-half months. I had to come back.
Q: What drew you back to the Cardiac Surgical Intensive Care Unit so quickly?
A: I was making a difference there. Anytime you interact with a patient, you either have them walk away with a good feeling about what that interaction was or not such a good feeling, but I truly enjoy working in a critical care setting. I feel like I'm contributing more because I'm there helping the team make the decisions, recognizing what's going on, picking up those little subtleties.
Q: What is it like working at an academic medical center such as UW Hospital?
A: Here you have the difference between a private practice hospital and a university hospital, with residents that you're trying to help train. They rely on their nursing staff more because the attending is not always there, so the nurse has to become very familiar with her patient population to be able to help a resident pick up on the subtleties of a changing situation that may need some interaction.
A: Here you have the difference between a private practice hospital and a university hospital, with residents that you're trying to help train. They rely on their nursing staff more because the attending is not always there, so the nurse has to become very familiar with her patient population to be able to help a resident pick up on the subtleties of a changing situation that may need some interaction.
Q: Is a career in nursing what you hoped it would be?
A: It's what I thought, and a whole lot more. A whole lot more. I never realized the extent that you can actually help change somebody's life, make their life better.
Q: What do you like about your unit?
A: I work in a unit where the nursing staff is very cohesive. We all recognize that you don't do it alone. There's no way. There's no one nurse that can come and do it by herself. She needs support from her fellow nurses. She needs to know that if things start to go bad, all she has to do is let out a yell and there's going to be people at her side in an instant. And I work in a unit where the nursing staff does that very well.
Q: What do you find most challenging about your job?
A: The complexity of the patients I deal with. When you first start, you have this whole vast knowledge deficit of learning the machinery, of learning the pathophysiology of their disease states, what they're typically going to do, how you typically treat it. So when you first start, there's this huge, tactile knowledge deficit.
As you go on and you start to incorporate some of that, then you need to incorporate 'how do I relate to this person?' This is not just some thing that's having bypass surgery or a valve replacement. This is a person. So you have to take your technical skills and incorporate them into your, what I call feely-touchy skills, to relate to that person and to find out where they're at.
Q: Why did you choose to become a nurse?
A: I think anybody going into nursing originally has pretty much the same feelings I had. You want to help somebody. So you're bringing into it this desire to help somebody on an emotional level. Then you're thrown into a situation where you have to absorb all this technical skill, too. So you have to integrate all the technical skills you need with that humanistic side. You have to be able to explain to patients what's going in words they can understand, to support them if they're feeling anxious, if they're feeling depressed, if they're feeling scared, whatever they're feeling.
When you are walking out at night and somebody says or a patient says, 'Are you coming back tomorrow?,' you recognize that you did it, you achieved it, that you not only provided them the medical and the technical skills that they needed, but you also provided them the support they needed.
Q: Where do you find the compassion to give the kind of care patients at UW Hospital expect?
A: When you connect with a patient, it's because you can almost see an aspect of yourself in that patient. That patient could be your mother, or your father, or your brother, or your husband, and so, in a way, when you connect with that patient, you are connecting because you are incorporating them into an aspect of your own life. You are feeling like this is how I would want my loved one treated. So I'm going to provide that because I have connected with you.
I can see you in some aspect of my life. I can see where your needs are because you're somebody's mother, you're somebody's father, you're somebody's loved one. And just looking at somebody who looks at you, and they don't even need to say it, they just need to look at you and you can see it in their eyes that they're scared, that they don't understand, that they're frustrated. Making that connection and making some of those wrongs right is a very rewarding feeling.
Q: Why did you choose to work at UW Hospital?
A: I don't want to try to take anything away from the other hospitals in town. They do what they do and they do it very well. But personally I choose to continue to work at the UW for the fact that, in my unit, I can deal with people who need heart transplants, lung transplants. It's a wider knowledge base. I am somebody who loves learning. I love to continually learn. I love a challenge. There is one thing that UW Hospital and Clinics will provide a nurse and that's a challenge. And I love a challenge.
