Q: Following your name is a pretty impressive list of degrees, including a doctorate, Registered Nurse, Acute Care Nurse Practitioner-CS, Fellow of the American Academy of Nurse Practitioners and Certified Massage Therapist . What has driven you to continually build upon your education?\nA: I've worked hard to try to attain the best education possible to try to be the best educator possible, and to try to provide the best care I can to patients.
Q: How much do you allow your experiences as a student to shape your role as a professor?\nA: I think that every interaction, whether it be with a faculty member or another student you learn from, is important. My goal is to see what students' passions are and to facilitate them getting what resources they need to meet their own goals.
Q: This semester you are teaching three different courses: Clinical Decision Making in Acute & Specialty Care; Crisis Management and Emergency Preparedness; and Exploring Culture and Healthcare Access Issues through Remote Area Medicine, the third of which is particularly interesting. Would you mind explaining the last course in more detail?\nA: It's a course that in the past has been open only to Nursing students [but] this year, it is open [to] students across campus ... It looks at culture and how culture can impact the care that is provided in the health care system.\nAt the end of the semester, once in the summer, there is a yearly clinic in Wise, Va., where students and other volunteers come together. The volunteers come from across the country ... to provide care to people that would not have gotten care otherwise. It could be because they lack insurance or access to a doctor. The clinic sees about 5,000 patient over two-and-a-half days. Students [in the course] rotate through different areas ... [and] they function as a part of a team that provide care for the patients.
Q: In 2000, you were one of the people credited with introducing mobile computing and the use of personal data assistants to the Nursing School. Please describe what role technology is playing in your classrooms.\nA: All of our graduate nursing students are required to have a PDA of some type ... When students are in their clinicals, they utilize PDAs constantly as references ... They're actually very beneficial in decreasing the amount of time to find information that you might need.\nTechnology is advancing very quickly. Of course the phones now have expanded ... [and] have more capabilities now that allow someone to access someone to get more information faster.
Q: To an outsider looking in, there seems to be a very interesting, very close-knit culture that characterizes the Nursing School - students call teachers by their first names and everyone seems to know most everyone else. How do you think the culture of the Nursing School adds to instruction and learning?\nA: The fact that a lot of the classes are smaller than in other schools allows students and professors not necessarily to get to know each other better, but faster ... Also, outside of the crew team, they are the only group of students to wake up at extremely early hours, so that they can do clinical ... at the hospital, witness a lot of stress. They see babies born into the world but also see people die. The close-knit culture allows openness and the opportunity for students and faculty to support each other.
Q: Last month, you participated in a January term trip to St. Kitts and Nevis. What was that experience like?\nA: The purpose of the course was to give students the opportunity to study abroad and look at disaster preparation. It was open to students across the University. Students had the opportunity to learn not only from professors at the University ... but also from the physicians and the nurses and people on the islands who are actively participating in relief efforts and recovery.
Q: I understand that you are also involved in a Haitian relief organization.\nA: It's a collaborative group. We haven't created a title yet for the organization ... But our goal is to provide support and to organize a team of nurses and physicians to work with the Virginia Medical Society, Operation Smile, Partners in Health and the U.S. Navy. We've been asked to be part of the first team that goes down to set up a tent in Haiti, in Port-Au-Prince.\nMy role has been to help coordinate that effort. The goal would be for us to rotate teams in and out.
Q: When you're not working, how do you spend your free time?\nA: I also do a lot of volunteer work with the Madison County Rescue Squad and the Emergency Nurses Association ... And I like to hike and spend time with my pets. I just have a cat and a dog.
Q: Had you not chosen a career in the nursing field, what area do you think you would be working in today?\nA: I wanted to be a paramedic first and I actually became a nurse first, then a paramedic. So now, I actually get to do both things.
Q: There's a very heated debate going on in Congress as to what, if any, health care reforms should be made. As someone who has extensive experience in the health care industry, what do you think most needs to be addressed?\nA: There needs to be a minimum standard of access of care for all people regardless of what their income is that provides for screening exams and preventative care ... There needs to be some type of universal health plan for every citizen in our country.
Q: What is something your students do not know about you that they may be interesting?\nA: Maybe that I'm an introvert. I really had to work on that and I think I've been successful ... [but] that might be something about me they wouldn't expect.
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