>> My name is Sharon Johnson
and I'm a nurse by Background
and I'm here with the Home Care Network.
I'm director of Home Health and hospice.
The Home Care Network is a
provider of in-home services.
We have home health, we have hospice, we have
home infusion and we have private duty services.
The home health services and the
hospice services are nursing;
occasionally therapy is involved with the
cases, and home health aides and social workers.
I'm very often here in the office and/or I'm
at one of our facility hospitals at meetings,
usually, mostly of a patient care related nature
or sometimes patient safety
and quality meetings.
Here in the office -- right now
I'm into the evaluation process,
and we're all completing evaluations on
our managers and our educators and they
in turn are working with our
nurses and our therapists.
So that's today's day.
I chair several committees, so I'm frequently
you know, overseeing a meeting in the area
of clinical management and quality, and our
professional advisory committee is one I chair.
I'm basically the person who oversees and makes
sure that our care meets standards of care
and also meets regulatory requirements
with the department of health,
with the Center for Medicare and Medicaid
Services, we are a Medicare agency,
and so we go through the normal survey
process and I'm the one that oversees
that we're doing everything the right way
we should be, that policies are developed,
and they're according to standards of care.
The other piece is that I have
responsibility for overseeing the standard --
the practice of nursing to make sure that my
nurses are practicing to the fullest extent
of their license, but also
not overstepping that.
And that includes professional development,
we offer educational courses here,
we do inservicing, sometimes I'm the one
doing the in-service sometimes I delegate
that to someone else.
I absolutely have been in love with
nursing from the time I was a teenager.
I started out really working with my grandmother
who was a licensed, professional nurse
in a nursing home, and I used to go and spend
time with her and spend time with the residents,
and really got interested in nursing that way.
I was in the hospital for many, many years
but I left the hospital in
1995 and came into home care.
And the two things that really motivate me the
most are working with nurses and making sure
that they're practicing to the best
of their professional capability,
and also overseeing quality care for patients.
And again, I've been in a manager or
leadership position since the early 80's
and really beginning to work with very
young nurses and occasionally students,
we have students that rotate through
the hospitals as well as here,
and working alongside them, sharing
ideas, you know, sharing my stories
about my experience professionally, and
listening to and watching them develop.
That's really the spark that
keeps it going for me.
So the whole idea of dealing with
chronic illness comes into play,
the hospital sees someone
in acute distress situation;
they're doing things to them and for them.
We go into the home and we try to teach and we
try to coach, and we try to put support systems
in place so that people can
continue to thrive in their home.
And people have choices so they can
make choices to ignore what we've said,
which often leads to not always the most
positive consequences, so it's a big challenge.
Again, we're invited into their home.
The person who oversees patient care in a
home care agency must be a registered nurse.
That doesn't mean that other people can't own
home health agencies and hospice agencies,
they can, anyone can own them as long as they go
through the requirements, but the requirement is
that a nurse oversees the patient care end
of it and the nursing practice piece of it.
A good nurse is just someone who wants
to take care of people, who's nurturing,
doesn't just want to see them when they're
well, is able to watch them age and become frail
and support them through
illness, sometimes through death.
Support the families; you know, look at
the patient and their family and as a unit
and as a social organism so to speak.
And that really is what a nurse needs to have.
They need to have a good, strong,
scientific background and not be afraid,
you know, to delve into the sciences.
You can't get through nursing anymore
without having a good solid nursing
-- I mean science background.
I started in the 60's in nursing.
And I actually started in a diploma program.
I went to Broward Hospital School of Nursing,
which was a three year diploma program.
At that time there were many,
many more diploma programs
than there were baccalaureate degree programs.
And I looked at baccalaureate
degree, but, you know,
the funding was such that I didn't have a lot of
finances, and so being a diploma nurse was going
to be an easy way for me to
get through in three years,
sit for my state boards and begin practicing.
While I was at Broward, I actually
took a few courses at Villanova
because obviously I could jump on the train
and be at Villanova in minutes, and I took two
or three courses that first summer
because I knew eventually I was
going to go and get a degree.
I had planned when I graduated to
move to the Boston area with some
of my friends and pursue college.
Then when I met my husband I ended up
getting married and starting a family,
so I didn't really start back to school until my
late 20's and during that time I was practicing.
I was working first as a staff nurse and
then as an evening and weekend supervisor
when my children were small, and I started
back for my baccalaureate degree --
I actually started at Villanova,
but transferred to Penn State
and finished my baccalaureate
degree there in 1986.
Then I took a little bit of a break, three
years, and then went back for a Master's
in Nursing Administration at
Villanova, which I completed in 1991.
Well I would recommend if they're on
the fence about nursing that they start
out in a major that's going to provide
them with at least the base courses.
And then, you know, connect with some
people in their lives that are nurses,
or some other people, you know; maybe
their university has a career center.
And we've had students here, I've
had graduate students here with me.
I've had undergraduate students going back for a
degree, and I've had non-nursing people who are
in a different type of healthcare field
who just want to see what's nursing's like.
And they can come spend a day
with a nurse, trail a nurse,
many of the high schools are connected
with hospitals, and they have a --
like a senior internship where you can actually
go and work alongside a group of nurses and find
out what nursing's all about, or what medicine's
all about, or therapy, any of the healthcare.
So those would be the kinds of programs that
I would advise a young person to seek out.