Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Hi, everyone, this is Dawn Klem, and you are on my podcast, Milkweed and Monarchs.
[00:00:07] Today I'm gonna start talking about my transitioning from Maine back to Michigan.
[00:00:14] I had gotten to the point where my mom could not really handle all the darkness in Maine. And it is true, in the winter in Maine, it starts getting dark at 4, 4 o'. Clock. I think we have about a half an hour more of light in Michigan.
[00:00:32] And she just felt like it was really too depressing. So she wanted to come back to Michigan, and she wanted me to come back to Michigan.
[00:00:42] She's like, you have lived away from Michigan your whole adult life. I would like you to come back to Michigan, be closer to the family and be closer to me.
[00:00:55] So I had started thinking about it quite a bit, and Craig at that time was struggling a little bit with his job. He had been working as a computer engineer during the dot com business, and he was finding himself getting laid off a lot, and he wanted to have a study job. He actually at one point started his own own construction company.
[00:01:24] And he's very good at building and everything, but he just didn't see himself doing that for the rest of his life either.
[00:01:31] So both of us were kind of in a transition period at that time. I was working at Maine Medical center as the bone marrow transplant coordinator, which I have to say, I really love that job. I mean, I loved it.
[00:01:49] So the job was anybody that was diagnosed with lymphoma that was eligible to be able to go through a stem cell transplant.
[00:02:03] I coordinated all of their care, and I was also in charge of the regulations for the American association of Blood Banks, our manual.
[00:02:15] So I went through an inspection process with that, and I helped quite a few people go through a stem cell transplant.
[00:02:25] And my mom was like, don't you see? Haven't you seen enough sadness in your life?
[00:02:32] I think you should, you know, come back to Michigan, see what kind of job you can get back there, and then be closer to. To home.
[00:02:42] So I'm like, okay, I hated to give up the job, and they didn't want me to leave either. But it was time. There really was time. Craig needed to find stability and I needed to be closer to home.
[00:02:55] So I was in the dentist office thinking about all this, waiting to go in and get my teeth cleaned. And there just happened to be a magazine on the table.
[00:03:07] It said, the top 10 places to retire to Now. Not that I was getting ready to retire or anything, but I thought, well, if I am going to retire, why don't I want to Be in one of these places instead of moving again. I just want to move one more time.
[00:03:23] So listed as number four in the magazine was Holland, Michigan. I'm like, really?
[00:03:31] Okay, let me check this out.
[00:03:34] So I hadn't been to Holland in years. I think we had gone to Holland when I was a little girl. We went up to the tulip festival.
[00:03:44] And I remember we got there and it had been a really windy day the day before, and there were no nothing but stems. The tulips had all blown away. My dad was so disappointed.
[00:03:58] But I don't really remember thinking too much else about Holland. Well, I read the whole article about Holland.
[00:04:06] It's such a beautiful little town or city. I guess it's not really a big city, though. But they have a university there and they have a hospital there. So I said, well, let me look into this and see what this is all about. Right.
[00:04:23] So I went on their website for the hospital and I saw that they had an opening for an inpatient nurse educator on a medical unit.
[00:04:39] This is a far stretch from what I've been doing, right? I mean, I've been an oncology nurse for a long time.
[00:04:47] And I'm like, maybe I should start to slow down a little bit. The girls are going to the. Georgie was going to be a freshman and Mirella was going to be in the seventh grade.
[00:05:00] So they were getting to the teenage part of their life.
[00:05:06] And I thought a smaller environment might be better for them. Of course, I always think about Hillsdale High School, where I went to school, Atlas smaller, but it was so much fun.
[00:05:20] So I wanted them to have that same kind of experience.
[00:05:24] The high school, the school. High school that Georgia would be going into was quite large and it was in an affluent area. So I always worry about that too. I want them to have. I wanted them to have like a normal, everyday upbringing like me.
[00:05:42] So I applied for the job as an educator at Holland Hospital and I got hired almost instantly.
[00:05:53] I came in for an interview and they hired me.
[00:05:59] In the meantime, Craig got a job back here too.
[00:06:03] So we packed up everything and we moved back to Michigan the summer of 2008.
[00:06:12] Well, I started working at Holland Hospital. And you have to remember, I went from a 600 bed teaching hospital to a 70 bed small community hospital. I'm like, oh my God, this is not going to work for me at all.
[00:06:30] Everyone was very, very nice, but it was not anything that I really wanted to do. I was not interested in it. And some of the care that went on there. They're very Great. The hospital is beautiful, um, and everyone is so nice and friendly, but they're inexperienced with, you know, more complicated cases.
[00:06:53] So I just didn't know how I felt about that at the time.
[00:06:58] And I had seen a couple things that made me question, you know, what are you doing here? Kind of thing.
[00:07:03] It was also a very long drive because we ended up moving into Spring Lake.
[00:07:09] And Spring Lake had, like, was rated number two in the state of Michigan. In their high school, in their range, I think they were a class C.
[00:07:22] And I'm like, well, I want the girls to get a good education. So I was happy about their school, but I wasn't happy about my drive from Spring Lake to Holland.
[00:07:33] Craig was working in Grand Haven.
[00:07:36] So I started looking around while I was still working at Holland, and I had an interview at Trinity Health in Grand Rapids.
[00:07:46] And that would have been okay, but they wanted to hire me as a clinical nurse specialist for diabetic education. I'm like, that's completely out of my purview.
[00:07:56] That is not something I want to do.
[00:08:00] And then I found out about Mercy Hospital in Muskegon, and I applied there as a Magnet coordinator.
[00:08:09] Now, for those of you that don't know about Magnet, that's actually a nursing award or a nursing designation, I should say.
[00:08:20] And they created it for nurses.
[00:08:24] So basically, the truth of the matter is that nurses are the ones that run the hospitals, okay? The doctors come in and out to see the patients, but the nurses are the ones that are there 24 hours a day taking care of those patients.
[00:08:42] So they came up with Magnet as a way to show nursing excellence.
[00:08:48] And if you see a hospital that is magnet designated, like, right now, corewell Health is magnet designated.
[00:08:56] So is the hospital in Marshall, Michigan. I'm just giving you two small examples that I know about on the west side of Michigan.
[00:09:05] And I know personally firsthand, because I worked at corewell Health, that they give excellent care. And then my friends go to Marshall, and I know they get excellent care there too.
[00:09:19] So I feel like magnet designation, a magnet designated hospital, is a good way to go.
[00:09:28] While I was working at Maine Medical Center, I. I actually wrote part of the Magnet documentation to get us certified as Magnet designated.
[00:09:40] And so I had that on my resume.
[00:09:43] And when I went to apply or interview at Mercy Hospital, they saw that I had written some of the Magnet document at Main Medical center, and so they wanted to interview me for that job as a Magnet coordinator.
[00:10:00] So I filled out my application. They called me immediately. I think the next day they called me and Asked me to come in for an interview.
[00:10:10] So I went in and interviewed, and they hired me right on the spot as the Magnet coordinator. It was the strangest thing. I went in, I talked to the director of professional practice, and I talked to the manager of professional practice. I talked to him all about my experience.
[00:10:29] I told him, you know, what we had done to achieve Magnet. And they're like, we need you here. We need somebody to lead this cause for us. I'm like, really? They said yes.
[00:10:42] So they went out and they talked to the chief nursing officer.
[00:10:46] And so then she came into the office and she interviewed me.
[00:10:51] I think I was there maybe 45 minutes with the three of them, and then they go, we want to offer you a job. I'm like, what?
[00:11:01] It was ridiculous. It was absolutely ridiculous.
[00:11:07] But I will say that was the other thing about working in Holland. The pay was low, very low.
[00:11:15] I wouldn't expect it to be high. It's a small hospital.
[00:11:19] But here I already went up, like $12,000. So pay is also something. And not driving was going to be great.
[00:11:28] They took me right down to hr.
[00:11:31] I filled out an application.
[00:11:33] They approved it immediately. And then I was supposed to start, like, in two weeks.
[00:11:41] And I had to call Holland Hospital and say, I'm not coming back. And that was kind of painful, I have to say. That was. You know, I look back on that and I think the way I went about it, I just said, I'm not coming back.
[00:11:55] This isn't the right place for me.
[00:11:58] I think they were really disappointed. I don't blame them. I mean, they had recruited me, but the job was not for me and I would not have been happy there.
[00:12:08] So I take this job, and two weeks later, on a Monday, it's not even two weeks, I think I interviewed on a Wednesday, and I started. A week from the following Monday, I go into work.
[00:12:23] So the problem that I did not know is that they were in the middle of merging two hospitals together, and they thought that Magnet designation and working towards that would be a way to unify the two hospitals.
[00:12:47] These are two hospitals that had been competitors for 100 years.
[00:12:53] Over 100 years, okay?
[00:12:56] And on top of that, they had two different nursing unions.
[00:13:02] I'm like, oh, my God, what did I get myself into?
[00:13:07] What am I doing here? Right?
[00:13:12] So I'm like. They go, really? I think, you know, if we can get this massive work towards magnet designation, that's really what is going to help us become more cohesive together.
[00:13:26] It's really is the right thing to do.
[00:13:30] So I'm like, okay, I'm going to give it my best shot.
[00:13:35] So the first thing I did was set up shared leadership councils. These shared leadership councils are councils comprised basically of a staff member from every inpatient unit and some of the clinics too.
[00:13:53] And there's like four councils. There's the professional practice Council, there's the Education council, Quality and research.
[00:14:06] So quality is looking at all your metrics from the inpatient units and looking at patient satisfaction scores and infection rates, those kind of things, to see how that's going. Research is conducting studies that is gonna help patient outcomes while they're there.
[00:14:30] Professional practice, they look at all the policies that are written in the nursing manuals and then they create new policies as needed for any new procedures there.
[00:14:43] And then education, you're always educating on new practice.
[00:14:51] So they were. We set up the four councils and then each unit, inpatient unit had what they called as like a unit based council.
[00:15:00] So they would talk about particular problems according to what's going on on that specific unit.
[00:15:09] So I was like, okay, I can do this. I've been doing this since I worked at Maine Med. I was very involved in it when I. Especially when I was a manager.
[00:15:19] And I was kind of excited about it, but I didn't realize how much of a rival there was between the two hospitals. I had no real, real understanding at all.
[00:15:32] And they station.
[00:15:35] My office was going to be at the Hackley campus and most of the other leaders were located at the Mercy campus. So I was kind of stuck there out on my own.
[00:15:50] And it was so funny too. They hired me, I started the next week and there was no orientation for me whatsoever at all.
[00:16:03] I was like walking around trying. They showed me where my office was. That was one thing they did show me, but they didn't show me where anything else was.
[00:16:13] I didn't even have any understanding of how to even get to the inpatient units. I have no understanding whatsoever. At all.
[00:16:24] So I remember walking down to the front lobby and we had a little receptionist area there where she would greet people when they came into the hospital and then give them directions on where to go to the clinic or if they're going to visit somebody inpatient.
[00:16:43] So I come walking down there and I introduce myself and I say, I'm new to this role in this area and I'm just wondering if you can give me directions on how to get up to the inpatient units, because I want to start introducing myself to some of the staff up there so they know what's going to be coming along.
[00:17:07] And she goes, so you're a new hire?
[00:17:11] I said, yes, I am. She goes like, tisking me and pointing your finger at me. And she goes, isn't that a shame that they would hire you after they've laid off so many people here?
[00:17:27] I find that disgusting. And I was like, what?
[00:17:32] I'm telling you, I was in a complete state of shock. And I'm like, did I just jump from the frying pan into the fire?
[00:17:41] What is going on here?
[00:17:45] But nevertheless, I went ahead and I took the elevator upstairs and I went to the two inpatient units in the icu. I started introducing myself, telling him what I was going to be doing.
[00:18:01] And the chief nursing officer said, you know, we're going to get a better education department up and running. Not part of the council, but an actual department.
[00:18:14] And you would be able to work with the educators as a way of getting the word out about shared leadership.
[00:18:24] So I was kind of excited about that because I could actually hire people that were going to be able to help me.
[00:18:31] There was a woman in place who was over shared leadership, but she had never done any of it before.
[00:18:40] So she quickly, quickly ended up just leaving the hospital. She didn't want to work with shared leadership and she didn't feel like it was her job. She was actually glad that I came.
[00:18:52] And there was an educator that had been working with her, so I took her along with me.
[00:19:00] We also ended up creating an informatics council because during that time, now it's 2008, the Hackley campus was not on computers yet.
[00:19:13] That was another thing that was so foreign to me. I mean, I had worked in California and I had worked in Massachusetts and Maine, so both coastlines and both of them were computerized. And I had never really worked anywhere where there wasn't really a computer.
[00:19:30] You know, the little things you take for granted. Right. But we did create this informatics council to try and help, first of all, the staff get up to speed with computer technology at the Hackley campus, but also then to, you know, streamline it. If new procedures came in place and things like that, you'd have a council that could make the policy for that.
[00:19:57] So it really was kind of fun because the nurses got to be involved in the plan of care in education and practice by doing research projects, by helping get computers streamlined and up to date, and looking at our quality metrics, which is huge. You always want to continue to improve on quality.
[00:20:28] We did take some of the other directors that were over departments like that, and then they also became part of the shared leadership councils, too. So they had me, but they also had a leader from that area that was in there.
[00:20:44] So I'm like, what am I going to do? They go, well, you. Right away, the chief nursing officer says to me, I think you need to do a shared leadership fair.
[00:20:57] Now, I will say the one good thing about me that I don't even mind talking about is I am creative. So I like to do things where I'm creating something out of the gate.
[00:21:09] So I had been working at Maine Med, and I saw how they kind of rolled it out. The first thing I did is create a PowerPoint for magnet for the hospital, so everybody knew what Magnet meant. So got the PowerPoint out, sent it out to all the directors and managers. And then the second thing I did right off the bat is a shared leadership fair.
[00:21:37] And that was kind of fun because I got to do things like I would get a popcorn machine, so there would be popcorn and snacks when people came in. And then we had booths for all the different parts of shared leadership, the quality research, all that. And there would be information at each booth, and there'd be quizzes, there'd be games, those kind of things. And they were very, very well attended.
[00:22:08] Everybody really liked those shared leadership fairs, and it gave me a chance to have a lot of fun.
[00:22:16] So we. We did actually end up getting pretty good counsels there. And I'll just give you a couple examples of some of the things that we did in the Professional Practice Council.
[00:22:30] One of the things that we wanted to do was connect better with the community.
[00:22:36] So we had one of the nurses that was on the council had a Christmas tree farm, and they would make wreaths every year.
[00:22:46] So we got her to bring the Christmas wreaths to the hospital, and then all of us would participate in selling them to the people that work there. And we made quite a bit of money for that council with the money that we made.
[00:23:03] We would buy food trucks and rent a food truck, I should say, and we take them to specific locations where people were in need, and we would spend the whole day handing. Handing out food at the food truck. The practice council absolutely loved it. And you can imagine why. Because they felt like they were really, really making a difference.
[00:23:29] It was a great thing.
[00:23:31] One of the things that the education Council did that I absolutely love. This was, like, one of my best events.
[00:23:39] We decided that we were gonna put on, like, a court case, and we got the auditorium at the local community.
[00:23:49] I got the doctor and some adopt the director of medical practice. There the chief medical officer and a lot of the directors to participate in a play.
[00:24:06] So we put a play on, and it was going to be all about documentation and what happens if you don't document correctly and you end up in a lawsuit.
[00:24:20] And then how I did it was, I was like, Harvey Weinstein. I think it's. No, not Harvey Weinstein. Harley Harvey Levin.
[00:24:32] Is that his name? I don't know. But, you know, the guy that would walk around after the court case and say, oh, how did you think about that? That kind of thing, to try and get their opinions.
[00:24:45] And so we got audience participation that way. And the other thing that we did is. And we had a jury and everything.
[00:24:56] It was so fun. So when the people were coming in to watch the. The play, there were certain people that got selected on their arrival to participate as a jury member. And they had to go up on stage two. So it was completely random. So we had a box of 12 jury members, which were really staff nurses. And then we had everybody else involved. And I would take breaks throughout the trial. And I had two lawyers.
[00:25:29] I mean, it was really, really fun. And then one of the educators actually made, like, Monopoly boards. And we called the seminar Hospitalopoly. So she made Monopoly boards for everybody at the tables afterwards when they were having their lunch. It was a lot. A lot of fun.
[00:25:54] And it was an interactive way to get people educated on the challenges of documentation, especially using an electronic medical record.
[00:26:08] So we were doing a lot of education in real time, all the time, and that was really a lot of fun.
[00:26:17] Quality would always have quality fairs and there'd be, you know, little quizzes to take and games to play.
[00:26:27] We did as much as we could to try and get the staff engaged.
[00:26:31] But I'm going to be honest with you, that was probably one of the hardest jobs I ever had, although I had a lot of fun. But when you have people that have been competitors for and two different unions, I'd never really even worked in a union environment.
[00:26:48] It was very difficult to get them to come together no matter what we did. Shared leadership helped. I do think it did help.
[00:26:58] And the events that we did did make a difference.
[00:27:03] We ended up also one other plug for education.
[00:27:08] We ended up putting a sim lab together in a separate building so they could do their basic life support and advanced cardiac life support classes there. And we did a lot of other education there. And it was in a neutral place, which I do think that helps sometimes, to that you weren't going either to the Mercy Campus or the Hackley campus.
[00:27:33] So a lot of good work was done. I had the privilege to work with some fantastic educators and the directors, too, and we really tried the best we could.
[00:27:47] I even started writing the magnet document.
[00:27:51] I think the worst thing that happened for me and what kind of put a damper on me is when I sat down and I was really trying to look at metrics to see if we were meeting the standards for magnet, because they still have a standard that you have to meet.
[00:28:11] And we really were not where we needed to be as far as quality metrics for patient outcomes.
[00:28:19] And so it was going to take a heck of a lot more to get that done.
[00:28:26] And I felt like the people that have been presenting the metrics were not presenting it in a way that people understood that we had more work to do.
[00:28:41] So I think people thought that we were just going to sail through it. I was going to write the document and everything was going to be great.
[00:28:48] But that really is not how it happened. And they still aren't magnet today.
[00:28:56] Some of the things, though, in a union that can be difficult. Let me. I just want to give you an example of that, because it sounds like this should be, you know, a slam dunk, and it's really not when you have unions involved. And there aren't very many union hospitals that become magnets. I know that now. But things like, let's say you have the break room for the nurses, and someone might put up a sign, your mother doesn't work here. Please clean up after yourself. I mean, that's a reasonable ask, I think. Well, it's a union hospital.
[00:29:35] The housekeepers got upset because the nurses were taking work away from them. That's their job. They should be cleaning the break room. So this is. These are the challenges, some of the challenges that we went through, and it wasn't pretty.
[00:29:54] I learned so much and I worked so hard, and I worked there for nine years, and then it was just time for me to go. It wasn't going to ever get to where I wanted it to be, and I felt like I had gone as far as I was going to go.
[00:30:12] So I ended up leaving there. We parted on good terms, but it was. It was touch and go for a while, let me just say that.
[00:30:23] So I hope you enjoyed my story today. It's kind of a mishmash of moving back to Michigan and starting a new job, but now at least you know how I ended up back here.
[00:30:41] Until the next time.
