Nursing Professional Development leaders work to recruit, train, support and celebrate nurses.
By Maureen Gilmer, Riley Children’s Health senior writer, mgilmer1@iuhealth.org
Two years ago, Erin Hittepole was working as a travel nurse in the Riley Hospital for Children Maternity Tower. A year later, she officially joined the labor and delivery nursing team, and now she is helping to lead the training and onboarding of new nurses in the tower.
Her role has evolved as her interests and skills have developed, propelling her onto Riley’s Nursing Professional Development team as a unit-based NPD practitioner, historically known as an educator.
“I fell in love with what Riley does here for maternity patients,” Hittepole said, “whether it’s low-complicated patients who use midwifery care, or patients who are the sickest in the state, and those who need fetal surgeries.”
As the Maternity Tower team has continued to evolve since the move from IU Health Methodist Hospital, Hittepole said she saw an opportunity to help in a larger way to support newly hired nurses through onboarding, teaching and mentoring.
Hers is but one role on the Nursing Professional Development team, managed by Sarah Hardacker and directed by Hilary Clements, but all members (centralized, unit-based and service line-based) are focused on recruiting, training, supporting and celebrating nurses on every floor at Riley.
Mary Claire Smith, who started at Riley as a patient care intern in 2018 before joining the PICU as a bedside nurse, transitioned to the NPD team last year, working alongside Bri Carrera on hospital-wide nursing education and development.
Smith met Carrera when she went through the summer internship program and during the yearlong residency program she completed when she started as a nurse.
“I loved the classes, and I loved Bri,” Smith said. “She did such a good job and was a wonderful facilitator. That’s really what motivated me to want to do education. I wanted to be like Bri.”
Now, the two work together to run the residency program, which all new nurses go through, as well as coordinate capstone projects, clinical placements, foundations classes and new skills training, among other tasks.
“If you’re a new nurse hire at Riley, you see us a lot,” Smith said.
For her part, Carrera started with IU Health as a student nurse before joining the Riley team as a bedside nurse, later earning a master’s degree.
She remembers what it was like when she was new to the profession and the team.
“When I sat in my initial onboarding classes, it was always the facilitators who were fun and engaging and relevant that I looked up to,” she said. “I thought I could do that for people and help them get excited about working here.”
While she and Smith focus on hospital-wide nursing development, each unit has an NPD practitioner who oversees onboarding, as well as the development of skills and tasks specific to a unit, whether that’s making sure nurses are meeting the goals they’ve set for themselves or that they are getting the experiences they need to be proficient on certain skills at the bedside.
“When nurses come to Riley, they are working in such a special patient population, whether it’s peds or obstetrics,” Carrera said. “These are worlds that they get minimal cases of in school.”
So, for some new nurses who start at Riley, “it’s like they’re doing school on steroids,” she said. “Everything they’re learning is new.”
The layer of support the NPD educators provide, not just in the first few weeks, but throughout the first year and beyond, is critical for the successful transition from school to professional nurse, Carrera added.
Hittepole works alongside fellow NPD practitioner Jennifer Anderson to cover nurses working in labor and delivery, OB-ICU and mother-baby in the Maternity Tower. She makes it a point to round on both day and night shifts to check in with nurses.
“It helps having a leadership team that hears them and continues to advocate for them,” Hittepole said.
That’s the goal, the three educators said, and it’s worth highlighting this week during Nursing Professional Development Week.
“We want people to know that NPD is there all day every day for every nurse,” Smith said. “It doesn’t end with graduation. If there’s a project you want to be involved with, a certification you want to get, a skill you need to master, or a process you want to change, NPD is there to develop you professionally.”
And while they are no longer working at the bedside, they continue to play a vital role in the care and support of patients, Carrera said.
“We get to support nurses rather than patients, but that is critical because our patients benefit in the long run.”
Photos by Mike Dickbernd, IU Health visual journalist, mdickbernd@iuhealth.org