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Welcome!

Welcome!  Here's a site that might prove useful to you as the nursing student, practicing bedside nurse, and nurse seeking a career transition. My students were the inspiration for this blog as I discovered I was having the same conversation over and over: Nurses need mentors and there are too few out there.  Hopefully, this site will lead you to some helpful insights, essential humor, and support for those challenges and high moments that involve being a nurse.  I will try to post regularly (I think weekly might be feasible) with exceptions made at the end of the semester when grading for large classes takes a lot of time.

You can email me with questions about (también en español y mais u menos em portugués): Surviving nursing school, the job search (AD, BSN, MSN, PhD, Post-Doc), career progression (to grad school, or not to grad school, that is the question!), and working in global health.  Am sure other topics might come up and I hope I can help there too.  Meanwhile, in the interim I hope to share with you insights into building one of the most amazing careers you can have in a very special field: Nursing.

My background includes 11 years worth of real life, hands on, bedside nursing experience coupled with additional years of teaching and research.  You can read more about me here: http://www.nyu.edu/nursing/faculty/bios/ft/aps6.  In summary, I worked 3 years in med-surg float pool at a large, urban medical center, did a 2 year stint in staff development in a rural community hospital in Pennsylvania, and then committed to 5 years as a staff nurse in kidney transplant in at a university teaching hospital in the northeast.  I've been the only bilingual nurse where I've worked and spent a lot of time translating between patients and providers.  Somewhere in there, I also worked on a congressional campaign in Nebraska and have a deep understanding of rural health issues in the US. I am a health policy geek who often goes through election withdrawal at the end of a presidential campaign season.  Globally, my hands on work has been mostly in Latin America.  Research-wise, I've had the privilege of collaborating with colleagues from 28 countries.

My true love for work lies in global healthcare human resources development issues.  All the cool gadgets, technology, and resources in the world can't replace the effect that a competent, well-educated human being can have on patient and health outcomes.  It's deliciously complicated and people in policymaking positions are just starting to figure this out.  It's going to cause a major paradigm shift in health services delivery, economics, politics, and a host of other fields.  If global health sings to you, you're in the right place at the right time, no matter what your discipline.

So again, WELCOME!  Thank you for choosing Nursing, no matter what country you're in or where you are in the world.

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