Transcript
0:00 – As our healthcare changes, the role of an FNP is going to become increasingly more important. There’s such a shortage of primary care providers and we as FNPs can serve in that role. You see that in satisfaction surveys that family nurse practitioners are often preferred because they have that underlying nursing background. We look at that patient as a whole and I think that FNPs are going to have a growing role as things change.
0:37 – In family nurse practitioning, you’re working with anyone from infants, children, adolescence, adults, up to geriatrics and elderly patients, so it’s the whole lifespan and that’s what I enjoy is working with those different groups.
0:52 – I love it, it’s a challenge every day. You feel like you’re helping patients and you’re helping people and the nurse practitioner definitely provides more accessible, good care to people in underserved areas that really need it.
1:09 – The courses that I teach in the graduates program are the final two family nurse practitioner courses. So this is going to deal with the adult illnesses, this is where we talk to them about hypertension, diabetes, heart disease – things that they’re going to be treating in primary care and this gives them the basic understanding for that.
1:26 – I’ve found that through choosing the FNP program, it provided me the opportunity to not just work in a family practice office or an internal medicine office. I’ve had opportunities that I wouldn’t have had if I had specialized in just adult health or women’s health. As an FNP, I could work in an OB-GYN office if I chose to, I could work in a pediatric office, I’ve had the opportunity to run an occupational medicine department, I’ve had the opportunity to work in retail and all these things that I could fit around my schedule and my family and still have everything that I love to do.
2:02 – What makes me excited about becoming a family nurse practitioner is really, I get to utilize my past thirteen years of nursing and just take it to a more advanced level, learn new skills and have a different role in patient care and in the healthcare field. As I have always felt very passionate about patients and being a nurse, I just feel very blessed to practice at a different level.
2:25 – I wanted to practice, really, at the prevention side of things. I worked in a CCU – a coronary care unit – and saw too often people that had aspects of their lives that they could have changed that would have prevented the heart attack or the hypertension that led to a heart attack. So I really wanted to make that impact and I also knew that there was a need within my community. I’m able to do my nursing role and my primary care role of teaching and supporting and connecting patients with public resources and other healthcare resources because that’s the nursing role. So being in a primary care setting at this time means a lot of the things I would have been doing in a hospital, twenty years ago, I’m now doing in a primary care office.
3:10 – I really enjoy talking with patients, I really enjoy getting to know them, I really enjoy showing them that I care and I want to help them. I know as a family nurse practitioner I will be able to do that and Duquesne is setting me up for success with that.