Nurses on the Move: Paula Roe

As fall approaches and nurses return to high school, it will be important to take a look at how academic and skilled education can shape the nurse in alternative ways.

September’s Nurse on the Move, Paula Roe BSN, MBA/HCM, FACHE, has a singular background in nursing. He currently serves as a senior advisor at Simpler Consulting – where he helps clients achieve lasting, breakthrough improvements in care quality, productivity and price reductions by applying process improvement techniques to day by day operations – and as an operational excellence practice leader, accountable for Simpler’s internal process improvement.

Previously, she served as vice chairman of operations for six years at St. Elizabeth Healthcare – a regional hospital system situated in northern Kentucky. Previously, Roe spent 13 years at Toyota Motor Engineering and Manufacturing American, where she learned the tools utilized in the Lean management industry. Roe’s experiences have shaped her perspective as a nurse and operational leader. During our interview, I discovered how these different backgrounds influenced her thoughts about nursing and patient care.

A profession as a nurse was not my original plan. When I enrolled at Ohio State University, I used to be pursuing an engineering degree. During my sophomore 12 months of faculty… I used to be required to take pre-med anatomy classes to satisfy my bachelor’s degree requirements. As soon as classes began, I knew I used to be hooked. I soon met with my advisor and decided that nursing can be the perfect selection for me.

Early in my nursing profession, I participated in staff nurse mentoring and had the chance to recurrently present to hospital administration. I actually enjoyed this interaction and was involved in hospital administration because the CTU/SICU manager. When I began working at Toyota as a security, health and environmental administrator, I never lost my dream of working in health care administration. Fortunately for me, Toyota offered on-campus MBA programs, and I used to be in a position to pursue a master’s degree specializing in healthcare management.

Lean is about delivering value to the client. From a nursing perspective, the client is the patient and his family. When you consider nursing and the tenets of Lean – striving for zero defects, relentlessly pursuing value, and providing services within the least wasteful way possible – the 2 are necessarily harmonious with one another… Providing care is spending time with the patient and providing nursing value. We must continually strive to eliminate wasteful steps, difficult our day by day activities to spend more time with patients and supply the perfect care within the least wasteful way possible.

When you start your profession at Toyota, you start a lifelong journey of hands-on learning. Training progresses as you practice and apply Lean skills. Lean can also be a team model; allows teams to attach their ideas and thoughts in order that your entire group focuses on what’s most vital. But with Lean, the team makes decisions about execution and results together. The motion is immediate, which suggests you may achieve breakthrough leads to a really short time. I quickly learned how the Lean team approach could possibly be applied to the nursing world.

I recently got here across a quote from renowned leadership expert Dr. Stephen Covey: “Leaders do the right thing and managers do the right thing.” To me, a nursing leader is one who does what is correct for his or her staff, the patient, the organization, and the population served.

I imagine that nursing will proceed to evolve throughout the occupation and that modern ways of providing care and models of patient treatment will emerge. However, nurses may also should search for solutions outside nursing. I predict that Lean and other management techniques will change into more widely available. I imagine that the pace of change within the industry would require recent and disruptive ways of things, and traditional approaches to improvement will likely be challenged. As Einstein said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” In nursing, we are going to have to think outside the normal nursing box to eliminate waste and ultimately spend more on the bedside.

Do you understand an incredible candidate who could possibly be featured on Nurses on the Move? We need to learn about nurses who’re advancing the occupation and provoking others to do the identical. Each month we are going to feature a brand new nurse. Send your entries by e-mail [email protected].