Welcome everyone to the Becker Health care podcast
series. I am Mariah Muhammad, Ryder and moderator
with Becker Health care. And I'm thrilled to
have with me today, Deborah Mccoy, executive director
of the Usc Nursing Institute at Ke Medicine
of Usc. Deborah very nice to have on
the podcast today to get started with you
mind, please introducing yourself and telling us a
bit about your background?
Certainly,
thank you. It's very nice to meet you
today, Mariah. I really appreciate the opportunity to
speak with you.
Again, my name is Deborah Mccoy, and I've
been in nursing for a little over 50
years.
Working in both acute care hospitals and
outpatient ambulatory care settings.
Most of my career has been spent in
developing and leading clinical service lines,
those service lines being such things as high
risk ob, cardiovascular,
neuroscience,
surgical specialties, etcetera.
Most recently, I served as the Vice President
and Chief Nursing Officer for a 03:50
bed full service community hospital in Arcadia
California.
And this hospital has now joined Ke Medicine
of Usc Health system,
which provided the opportunity to transition to my
current role in the Health System as the
Executive Director of the Usc Nursing Institute.
And the the system now has 4 hospitals
ke hospital,
Norris Cancer Hospital,
Usc Arcadia Hospital, and Hills Community hospital.
Wonderful. Thank you so much for sharing that,
and to begin with the first real question
I want to ask you, Deborah. What are
the biggest issues you're following in health in
this year?
The ones that we particularly interested in from
the... Of the nursing Institute perspective is nurse
recruitment and retention as well as the the
basic advancement of the practice of nursing.
And I would say that the number 1
issue that we discussed in our initial development
was nurse recruitment and nurse retention.
Got it. Got it. Thank you for,
sharing that information. I know for Becker, we
talk heavily about nurse recruiting and retention.
And that is something that's making a lot
of people nervous also and it inspires a
lot of conversation. Is there anything that you're
excited about with this new institute or anything
else that's making you nervous?
1 of the things that we were working
on in the very beginning as we thought
about developing the nursing Institute was
our education and development opportunities
and how we could lay a very strong
foundation for graduate
transition to practice.
Each of the hospitals has a new grad
residency program.
So we have incorporated the best practices of
each of the facilities and are now creating
what I would consider to be an exceptional
nurse residency program
to bring nurses into the facility and give
them the kind of confidence
and
expertise in practice that young aspiring nurses are
hopeful for. And I think that's 1 of
the things that will draw
nurses 2,
ke medicine of Usc and to nursing at
1 of our community hospitals or to check
medicine.
We're also looking at specialty care, including cardiovascular,
neuro surgical and transplant surgery.
So we have, care for patients in these
highly specialized programs.
So we are incorporating
education in the
expertise of caring for those patients as well.
And
I think that the varied career opportunities and
advancement that we have
and develop are developing is something that will
be very appealing to nurses as they're looking
to either enter the nursing career or perhaps
change careers and looking for an opportunity for
growth.
Yeah. Absolutely amazing. Thank you for sharing that.
In deborah, before I let you go, The
last thing I wanted to ask you is
what would the most effective health leaders need
in order to be successful in the next
2 to 3 years do you think?
Well, we are beginning, our discussion is for
a nurse manager development program to support our
nurses who aspire to leadership positions.
We talk about
communication. We talk about confidence, courage, compassion, the
things that you normally read and hear about
when you're thinking about leadership development
We're also wanting to enhance our,
our research and education program for a nursing
scholarship.
We believe that there are many nurses in
the field who are looking to be able
to add
their initiative and their sense of fiery into
the profession and we believe that our nursing
research program through our research council as well
as our leadership development program will offer
those types of
opportunities for nurse leaders.
I would also say that we're looking at
flexibility
and risk taking.
We know that nurses really need to be
able to move quickly in this environment. We
want them to feel as though they have
the opportunity to experiment and to
create
innovations and practice that eventually could lead to
evidence based practice and publication. So we believe
that that is something that
leaders really need to consider moving forward. For
health delivery in the future.
Deborah, thank you so much for sharing that
information.
Is there anything
about the Institute that we didn't talk about
yet? That you wanted to share?
I think I'd just like to share that
as a young health system and in developing
the nursing Institute over the first year,
We brought together key stakeholders from each entity,
both academic and community
to participate
and created a vision for the early development
of this Institute. And like I mentioned before,
there are 4 hospitals in addition to our
Usc Care ambulatory division, which is
comprised of 100 sites across Southern California.
And
we
are now operating the Institute under the guidance
of the 6 chief nursing officers who actually
lead those
institute... Those organizations to create a Nursing Institute.
And it is such an, an amazing collaborative
opportunity
I think it's a model of that other
organizations could use and it is working beautifully
for this
organization. We're pulling the best practices from each
entity and putting them together to create a
system wide
enterprise approach to nursing development and clinical excellence.
Amazing. Thank you so much for those final
thoughts, Deborah. This has definitely been a informative
discussion. So and again, I wanna thank you
so much for coming on Becker health care
and I look forward to connecting with you
soon.