Nurses Week 2025

May 07, 2025

Today, May 6th, marks the start of Nurses Week…

I started this journey as a candy striper volunteer at Jordan Hospital on the weekends in High School to help bring patients to their cars on discharge from the hospital. I wanted teh experience before nursing school at Georgetown.

I would often get asked why I wanted to become a nurse, and not a doctor. It turns out that you can be both 😉 (after a lot of years in higher education).

I have spent much on the last 20 years asking why and pushing the boundaries of what is possible in this profession. I can tire people out with my questions and vision for what should be, and not yet is, but I keep going…

My trajectory has given me the opportunity to speak to others in a variety of ways about how to think about the profession as well as creating one’s own personal trajectory.

Today, I reflected on Nurses Week as I recorded a promotional video for an upcoming event where I will serve as the Opening Keynote Speaker.

When I do speak, I often reflect back on what it was like as that new nurse and how much effort it took to get there. You can see me here as a nursing student in clinical at Georgetown in my starchy clinical outfit!

Nurses are the largest group of healthcare professionals in the world. There are 4x as many nurses to medical doctors.

Nurses are masters at knowing how to suggest treatments to doctors without making the doctors feel like it was not their initial idea (this helps build relationships 🙂 ).

Nurses are also masters at knowing something is off or not right with you (at work of course, but also with friends, family, and even strangers outside of work), without even saying anything… They will likely start trying to help you or ask you questions to figure out how they can help.

However, taking care of ourselves, as nurses, is hard at times. We have been trained to care for others first and literally put the needs of others before our own basic needs (e.g., lunch and bathroom breaks for example).

One way you can take care of yourself is taking that step forward that you have been wanting to take but have been nervous about making the move…

Maybe it is a new job, a new role, a new degree, a new specialty, a new schedule… Maybe it is not now but in the next few years.

Whatever you choose, embrace serendipity along the way….

~ Tiffany Kelley PhD MBA RN NI-BC FNAP

Nurses are Intangible Gifts

December 23, 2016    |   , , , ,

Happy Holidays! We are in the heart of the holiday season. I thoroughly enjoy this time of year! I enjoy the act of gift giving to others. I know many of you who are reading this do as well. We tend to think of gifts as tangible. Tangible gifts are things that can be wrapped such as toys, clothes and coveted wish list items. Yet, gifts can also be intangible.  Intangible gifts are things that cannot be purchased. Intangible gifts are often invaluable to their receivers.

So, what is an example of an intangible gift? I’ve heard parents often describe the birth of their children as gifts. I’ve also had moments where I received some help that was unexpected but very necessary at the point in time. That help from someone else was a gift to me. I’m sure many of us have had moments like that in our lives and/or stepped in for others in those moments. While there are many intangible gifts around us, I’d like to describe my belief that nurses are intangible gifts.

intangible gift

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Time to be Thankful for Nurses

November 23, 2016    |   , , , , ,

This Thursday we will celebrate another year of Thanksgiving in the U.S. It is often a time to reflect and be thankful for the blessings in our lives. I wanted to take a moment to write about how thankful I am to be a nurse.

happy thanksgiving

I spent a couple of days recently discussing the nursing profession with a small group of nurses from across the country. We discussed the common bond we all share for wanting to help others and the feelings of internal fulfillment when we can provide nursing care to patients and their families. Yet, what is often not discussed is our inherent superpower that holds the potential to benefit the lives of other human beings.

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Nursing workarounds and what they mean for the future of healthcare

September 28, 2016    |   , , , , , , , , , , ,

Nursing workarounds and what they mean for the future of healthcare. 

Last evening, I spoke to a group of approximately 60 graduate nursing students at Northeastern University in Boston MA.  I spoke on the topic of nurse entrepreneurship and intrapraneurship. The faculty members, Dr. Laura Mylott and Dr. Janet Rico wanted to show their students the different opportunities there are for nurses in the health care arena. Nurse entrepreneurship or intrapreneurship are two career options that we often don’t discuss in our formalized nursing education classes. However, I will tell you that they are very real career options and in many ways will be the only way in which we solve some of the day-to-day problems nurses are faced with at the bedside. The reason why nurses are the only individuals set up to solve these problems is because no one else knows they exist. No one is going to come knocking on the door with a solution to solve problems they don’t know exist.

Workarounds.

 I asked the class, “What is a workaround?”. It could have been that no one wanted to speak up but I didn’t get a volunteer to answer the question. So, I turned it around. “Ok. What is a problem you deal with every day and how to you get around it?” I had one student volunteer to tell the group that he works nights. At night, STAT labs are entered at midnight however the system goes down for 30 minutes every night at this time. It affects the timing in which labels are printed and subsequently when they can be drawn, resulted, and acted upon. So, instead of waiting and wasting time, he figured out a way to manually force print the labels. This is the workaround.
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Why aren’t nurses part of the conversation?

September 06, 2016    |   , , , , , , , , ,

A conversation a few months ago led me to wonder (and I should have asked), ‘why isn’t a nurse part of this meeting’?

 

conversation

At that time, I was speaking with a physician and a project director about bedside nursing solutions using mobile to address existing workflow challenges. I realized toward the end of the conversation that the problem we, at Nightingale Apps are working to solve with Know My Patient TM, was not well understood by the meeting participants. Yet, had a nurse been part of the conversation, we would have likely had a different outcome.

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Did you miss our #TweetChat today with Kareo?

May 12, 2016    |   , , , , , , , , , , ,

Today I was invited to host a #TweetChat with Kareo to discuss hot topics that affect us all, nurses, providers, patients and families. We had a wonderful discussion and I’m happy to share the transcript here: https://storify.com/GoKareo/patient-information-flow-technology#publicize 

What I learned today is that we could have discussed each one of the questions in great length. There is a recognition that there are challenges that we face today in accessing and using information from the side or the health care professional and the side of the patient. By getting past the challenges and looking toward how to solve, we can begin to chip away at these challenges and solve these problems that affect us all.

It was wonderful to have hosted this #TweetChat today on the last day of Nurses Week!

 

kareochat

Our profile on Florence Nightingale soon to follow!

Best,

Tiffany