Kristine - Mrs. Ripley Made Us do It!

Kristine -







I have many opportunities to talk with nurses. Nurses always describe themselves as caring and compassionate, but rarely do they talk about their knowledge and experience. It seems to go back to the first half of the 20th century, when women worked as teachers, secretaries or nurses. In order for respectable women to work as nurses, they had to be like nuns; virtuous. That feeling has carried over to today’s nurses. I see a need for improvement in professional role development for nurses.

I encourage nurses to celebrate the differences they make through their knowledge and good decision-making skills. Nurses prevent poor outcomes. They help people recover quickly because they prevent things from going wrong. Every patient is better off having a nurse watching out for them.

Nurses are educated, experienced, and have the acculturation to be professional, but until we act like professionals, we’ll never sit at the table where the other professionals sit. I just started an initiative to provide leadership development for staff nurses in the state of Oregon. I also regularly encourage nurse educators to incorporate leadership development into their programs.

A nurse doesn’t enter the nursing profession with the goal to be a leader. In fact, I didn’t even think of becoming a nurse. My friend wanted to be a nurse. So I took the courses she was taking. I told my friend one day that I’d been telling people I became a nurse because she wanted to be a nurse. She said, “Oh, no! That’s what my mom said I had to do!” So we’re both nurses because of Mrs. Ripley. Mrs. Ripley made us do it!

I was an Army nurse for 32 years. Military nursing is very professional and leadership is expected.“Develop confidence, take pride in your work, try something new, take charge of your work environment, take a leap of faith and control your future.” When I first joined the Reserve Unit in Ohio, I worked for a wonderful, inspiring chief nurse. I learned a lot about developing people from her. She gave me a project, let me do it, and if it was to be presented to the command staff, then I developed and delivered the presentation. I received basic guidelines for what the end product should look like, but it was up to me to determine the means to the end.

I also learned about leadership from a supervisor I had in Augsburg. He taught me how to be a head nurse. When I was new to the job I saw everything as a crisis. He helped me figure out solutions by asking questions. “What are your options?” He never told me what to do, just talked me through the thought process to arrive at solutions that might not have otherwise occurred to me.

By allowing me to make my own decisions, and supporting me in those decisions, both mentors taught me more than I would have learned if they simply told me what to do. These experiences led to my promotion to general.

I’ve experienced rich diversity in my career. Army nursing taught me there are 50 ways to do something right, because I worked with nurses from all over the world. I learned different ways to approach issues and solve problems. I mixed things up a bit to discover what worked best for me. Working in different countries and dealing with cultural differences was also interesting. For example, when I was in Bosnia we had major discussions with the medical professionals from Sweden and Norway about the use of restraints. They don’t ever use them because they think restraints are inhumane. But in the U.S., while we rarely use them, there are times we believe we need them for the safety of the patient. Who’s to say which way is correct? We’re probably all right in our own way.

My goal is to develop nurses to lead the teams taking care of patients. Teach them to make more decisions at the bedside and take responsibility for coordination and collaboration, rather than viewing their jobs as task oriented. If nurses have more leadership training, they may also develop the confidence and motivation to move to new areas of nursing. The opportunities in healthcare are infinite. Develop confidence, take pride in your work, try something new, take charge of your work environment, take a leap of faith and control your future.

Power Strategies: Influence, Diversity, Pioneer
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