SARAH: This is At the Core of Care, a podcast where people share their stories about nurses and their creative efforts to better meet the health and healthcare needs of patients, families, and communities. I'm Sarah Hexem Hubbard with the Pennsylvania Nursing Workforce Coalition, and I'm the Executive Director of the National Nurse-Led Care Consortium.
I'm excited to share with you that we recently underwent a brand refresh. We previously went by the Pennsylvania Action Coalition, and now we're the Pennsylvania Nursing Workforce Coalition—a new name to make our state's nursing workforce front and center. As part of a five-year strategic plan, we will continue to advance, support, and advocate for a nursing workforce that helps create a healthy Pennsylvania through equitable, high-quality, and safe nursing. And to implement our mission and vision to advance nursing and create a culture of health. We've established three core initiatives. They include bolstering nursing workforce pathways, reimagining public policy through data, and embracing diversity through equitable solutions. Joining me on this episode to talk more about our strategic priorities, as well as trends around the future of nursing and healthcare is Daniel Hudson.
Daniel is one of our newest advisory board members. He's the vice president and associate chief nurse executive for nursing operations and administration at Jefferson Health in Philadelphia. Which is now a 32-hospital integrated health system across Eastern Pennsylvania and Southern New Jersey. Daniel, welcome to At The Core of Care.
DANIEL: Thanks, Sarah. It's nice to be here with you.
SARAH: So, before we really dig in, can you tell us briefly, you know, why you chose nursing as your career? How did you get into it?
DANIEL: So, my story about how I got into nursing is not the typical story or journey. There’s actually no nurses or healthcare providers, even in my family.
Immediately speaking, and I had chosen to go premed right out of high school. And the reality is not that I wasn't happy or unhappy with premed, but the school that I had chosen, I was very unhappy about, which led me to go home. And on that Christmas break, I was sitting on the couch. I can go back there to this day talking to my mom and I was crying. And I just, I didn't know what to do because I didn't like the school that much. And my mom convinced me. She sat there and she said, you know, maybe you should try nursing. Maybe you should stay close to home and try nursing. And I kind of looked at her and I was like, well, what's nursing? I don't even know what that is. But I knew I liked science. I knew I liked math. I knew I liked the human body anatomy, things like that. And I knew I liked to just serve people. And so not really knowing. Uh, what nursing was my mom convinced me to take that track. She actually helped me complete my application and I will never forget. I had gotten into two local schools. One was an ADN program, like an associate degree. And the other was a four-year BSN program, but I was on the waitlist for the four-year one. And. My mom called them and she was asking them all these questions. One of them was the final question of, well, how many, how many men do you have in your program that's starting in this upcoming semester?
And I remember hearing her response saying, well, that alone's a reason to get him off the waitlist. And so, um, one thing led to another in that next semester. So, we're talking in a two-and-a-half-week period. I was now enrolled in a four-year nursing program, and I still didn't know what nursing was about. But I found out in my first clinical, what nursing was about, and immediately I fell in love with it. I just love the idea at that time of serving people in such a personal way. And that idea really resonated with me from a core value standpoint. And so I got through nursing school and I did my nursing residency at Vanderbilt and from there I went on to pretty much do about every type of clinical nursing you can probably think of until I transitioned into leadership around 2008. So not the typical story, but it's my story.
SARAH: We often talk about nurses as advocates, and I, I like your story because it's about mothers as advocates too, right, um, paving the way. So, now we've heard a bit about your nursing story. Tell us a little bit about the health system that you work for now, and what's your day-to-day role?
DANIEL: Yeah, so our system, as you noted, newly cemented 32 hospitals, so we are a growing, integrated healthcare delivery network. We now are one of the top 15 nationally ranked integrated health delivery systems with a total revenue of a little over 14 billion dollars. So, we are big. We serve communities across 32 hospitals, 360 sites of delivery across a large portion of southeastern Pennsylvania, and even portions of western New Jersey. And a part of that is that we serve a wide span, and we can do that with a more than 12, 800 nurses and more than 7, 800 physicians. And additionally, what makes us unique is that our system has a university with more than 9, 400 plus students and a healthcare plan that ensures over 360, 000 members. So, we are this gigantic care delivery system now, but we really believe because of the uniqueness of how we're set up within the communities that we can still be local. Which is really important. And then the question is my role within all of that. So currently I remain focused on what we call legacy Jefferson Health right now. So that's 16 hospitals on the Jefferson Health side prior to the merger. And that accounts for a little over 400 total care sites and a little over 9, 600 nurses.
I've been in my role for about two and a half years here at Jefferson, and I describe my role in three big buckets of work. The first bucket is building robust talent streams or care pathways, effectively and safely using our resources is the second bucket, and the third bucket is investing in and engaging our people. And so when you think about those three kinds of buckets on a day-to-day basis, I have a very strategic relationship with the Jefferson College of Nursing and other local community schools. In the Philadelphia region to build those pathways to set up apprenticeship programs is an example, whether you're a rural hospital, that's critical access, or whether you are a freestanding academic medical center, or whether you are an integrated healthcare delivery system, you can take these things. If you're doing them in the right way and the right method and in the right timing and scale it up and down and it really works. I also kind of oversee all the fun stuff with budgets and finance and Excel sheets and capital funding. Usually, when nurses don't like to get involved in, but again, as I shared, I like math and I like numbers. And I also kind of oversee some of the care delivery transformation work at Jefferson Health, how we're implementing virtual care nursing and thinking about our care models very differently, and all the flexible teams that we have in our staffing offices. And finally, in that investing and engaging our people, I am one of the executive sponsors for our nursing professional governance structure that we have at our system level, as well as our nursing leadership development program.
SARAH: What made you want to become involved with the Pennsylvania Nursing Workforce Coalition's Advisory Board?
DANIEL: I've been involved in nursing workforce operations now from like a strategy type perspective for a little over 10 years. I've seen the good, the bad, the in-between of this work, and I really want to ensure that we have the right people taking care of the right patients together as a strong, effective team. And that's my goal, whether it's doing that work for Jefferson Health. Doing that work on other boards in the community or being an advisor on boards. Another thing I think is I see we still have so much work to do to improve the environments in which our nurses and our staff are providing care. We've come a long way. But we've got a long way to go and systems remain cumbersome and very complex. I mean, we've talked about how big Jefferson is. We're very complex. And my passion is really to help evolve and grow the systems, including our people. I think of myself as kind of being a nurse to the nurses.
And so, I see the advisory board as a place to influence change at a larger scale, not just for Jefferson Health, but also for our Pennsylvania communities as a whole. And the coalition has already done some fabulous work, really important work. And now I believe it's the time with this refresh to really push the boundaries and continue to evolve how we collectively think about building our profession for the better of our community.
So, I see this as a great way to do all that.
SARAH: So, let's dive in now to talking about our three core strategic initiatives here at the Pennsylvania Nursing Workforce Coalition. We're going to start with our goal around bolstering nursing workforce pathways. So, Daniel, you just told us there are more than 12, 000 nurses’ part of the Jefferson Health System across 32 hospitals. That's a substantial workforce, just at Jefferson alone. Can you share with us some specific programs and initiatives that you're working on? Related to recruitment and retention.
DANIEL: So healthcare is complex. So, I'm going to try to keep this at a high level and explain it in a simple way. And so, we're going to break that building robust talent streams into two areas of focus.
And the way that we think about it is new to practice and experienced from a recruitment standpoint in particular. So, from the new to practice standpoint. As I mentioned, we have a university as a part of our integrated care delivery system, and we have one of the top nationally ranked nursing schools in the nation. Actually, that was something that came out in the last couple months. So, we've done a lot of work collaborating with the Jefferson College of Nursing to build programs that better prepare our new-to-practice nurses as they enter the profession. So not only are we providing locations for the clinical rotations themselves, we have a very extensive capstone program that offers students positions during that final clinical rotation. So, what this does is move the recruitment process up quite significantly. And it really shows that we have an ability to capture more of our Jefferson College of Nursing students. To enter into our healthcare system who we've invested in. We're able to hire around 50 percent of those nurses of the total graduating nurses every year.
So, what that means practically is that every year Jefferson is hiring around 250 to 300 new to practice nurses from Jefferson College of Nursing alone. And that's not even with the other colleges that we have strategic partnerships with. Additionally, we've done things like build apprenticeship programs for other hard-to-fill roles like surgical technicians. To do that, we leveraged a partnership with an external vendor, and they provide the didactic for that apprenticeship training and we hire those individuals, and they are employed by us while they're doing their clinical required. hours as well. So, it's a true apprenticeship program and we invest in that, and it's been highly successful. We've hired over 60 surgical tech apprentices in the last two years since we've launched that program. And more recently we've began to explore strategic partnerships with other local technical and community-based schools that we can continue to bridge that gap for both nursing and allied health professions.
And we really are passionate about really working with schools that are in our communities and build our diversity pipeline so that we have our people serving our people. And we'll talk about that a little bit later. So, when we talk about experienced nurses, we've invested in a good amount of resources, both people and dollars around advertising and innovative technology that helps us recruit experienced nurses. We've also built internal flexible teams like our nationally recognized SEAL team that attract experienced talent because the work. that they get offered is flexible, it gives them really good pay compensation, and it gives them the ability to work in many different care environments. And we're really learning with the newer generations and the younger generations.
SARAH: Can you just for our listeners clarify what the SEAL program is?
DANIEL: Yeah, Sarah. So, thank you. So, our SEAL program that stands for service, excellence, advocacy, and leadership. And that is our system based. We'll call it loosely Float Pool team that are our nurses that go across all three of our regions and all currently 13 of our hospitals so they could work in Center City one day. In Philadelphia and the next day, they could be up at Einstein and then the next week they could be over in New Jersey and then the next week they could be up in Abington. So, they are really flexible and they're really moving all around this system and we deploy them in a weekly basis for the majority. So, as I mentioned we focus on investing in and engaging our people. That was a big bucket of my work that I mentioned. And this one has been let's call it difficult over the last five years as we've been coming out of COVID. And I think that Jefferson done a pretty good job investing heavily in development programs, clinical advancement programs, wellness, and wellbeing programs, but it doesn't stop there. Jefferson invested over forty million dollars last year in our fiscal year. To give our nurses and all of our nursing staff. So patient care techs, unit secretaries, monitor techs, all of them, an additional 5 percent raise over the annual 3 percent raise. So, in a six-month period, they got an 8 percent raise over their base salary.
We really believe that was the right thing to do. And it was really focused on retention. We wanted to retain the knowledge and the skills within our system because we know that the city of Philadelphia, in particular, is highly competitive and nurses are working full-time jobs at one place and per diem at another place. And so, we really wanted to make that investment. And here at Jefferson Health, we also have an extensive clinical advancement ladder that incentivizes engagement and incentivizes career development, and it incentivizes growth on top of their base salary. We also have nurse leaders solely focused on well-being and wellness programs. And we also recently refreshed our system nursing professional governance structure to align better and connect to our regions. And that's really our structure where our nurses have a voice and decision-making around policies and procedures and the profession and how that translates at Jefferson Health. So that's just a little bit about recruitment and retention.
SARAH: And I think what we hear from, you know, nurses across the state is that it's not going to be any one solution. You sort of need all of them. For some, it's compensation. For some, it's advancement. For some, it's flexibility. Um, and really, really being tuned in to what the needs are, and the interests are. How about mentorship? We hear a lot about that, especially, and I know we'll dig into this more later, related to diversity. But how do you support mentorship and networking across the system?
DANIEL: We have several ways we do that for our new-to-practice nurses in particular, we invest in nurse residency programs. And so, across all of our hospitals, we have nurse residency programs that have mentoring built into those programs where they're coming together. They're sharing about their experiences. They're talking about different aspects of either our core values. Or professional topics like medication safety, for example. So, um, that's one way for new to practice in particular. The nursing professional governance is another way where that networking really comes in, right? So, we launched a system structure just very recently, a refresh of a structure we had in place. And we were very intentional on simplifying it and ensuring that the campus Councils in the system councils, same language, same purpose.
So, for example, we have a system council that is called the professionalism Development and Advancement Council. So, we have that at the system level, and we have that at each campus level, and we even have the chairs from the campus level ones that sit on the system one. So, you can see the intentionality of creating ecosystems within our macro ecosystem, right? And making those networking connections because it's about decision making, improving our profession, but it's also about sharing knowledge and cross-pollinating all of our work and experiences. So those are just a few ways. We have professional development programs for our nurse leaders too. We don't want to forget about them. And we're really intentional around bringing together, we have an all-nurse leadership forum that comes together quarterly for all of our nurse leaders. And we're thinking and being smart about those kinds of town halls, we'll call them for our nurses and our nursing staff, where they can talk with our executive or senior leaders and not just talk with them, but there's back and forth and they're sharing ideas.
So, lots of ways to create that networking and mentoring.
SARAH: Yeah, and I'm hearing a lot of creativity in terms of how to take a really big system, um, and drill down a little bit to create those, I think, ecosystems within the system, which is a really interesting approach. So on the flip side, and you had mentioned, you know, some of the challenges of the past five years, but, you know, thinking about the rapid growth of even [00:18:00] just the past year, Looking at the diversity of systems that have joined Jefferson, what are some of the challenges that you're seeing related to recruitment and retention?
DANIEL: As we continue to grow its large healthcare systems, right? That's kind of what we're seeing going on nationally. It's not just in Pennsylvania. It's a national trend that's going on, and there's lots of reasons why. But it creates lots of complexities, lots of ecosystems within ecosystems. And I would say that the culture is probably one of the biggest components that creates challenges to recruitment and retention. And just overall, just it creates challenges. I think about little things like people wanting to hang on to the name of their hospital and what it was called because they have an identity in that and in the community in which they're serving as well. They are attached to that identity, and it's been around for in sometimes 100 years even. So, thinking about how you take the good of that culture and weave it into the larger culture is work for you. That's ongoing that we're always thinking about and we're always focusing on. We really want to build an identity and we've been very intentional at Jefferson Health around what is our identity and honestly, what is our nursing identity?
We're in the midst of that work right now, even as Lehigh Valley is merging into Jefferson Health and thinking about, well, what is the nursing identity at Lehigh Valley? What is the nursing identity at Jefferson Health? What are the commonalities so that we can speak the same language and begin to form a common identity? I'd say another challenge, not so specific to a large healthcare system, certainly, this would apply to even a freestanding medical center, is medical surgical nursing. It has become one of the biggest challenges where we are seeing an average tenure of only around two and a half years within Jefferson Health. And you can sit and think, wow, well, that seems good when I hear about turnover. But the challenge to that is the majority of our beds and acute care are medical-surgical beds. And so, the skill and the competency is constantly in flux. And so, we're currently engaging our nurses through folks groups and different things to try to understand, well, what's driving this phenomenon? Why do nurses want to go on to be in ICU or ED or some other specialty? And is there anything we can do to increase that tenure in medical-surgical nursing specifically? And I'd say finally, patient care technicians, we talk a lot about nurses. You hear all about the challenges with the nursing are in workforce.
There's a challenge with patient care techs too. And one of those challenges is the reality, we're competing against Starbucks and Target when it comes to wages and benefit packages. And working at Starbucks is a little bit easier than working in a medical surgical unit in a hospital where we see patients and patient families being more aggressive towards the staff. And so, we're doing a lot in that arena as well. In the past year, we actually created a career pathway for patient care techs by upskilling them. And through that upskilling, we created a whole nother wage ban for patient care tech. So we have like a patient care tech one and a patient care tech to role. And so that's just one practical example of how we're trying to tackle both the PCT challenge, but also the medical surgical challenge. Even the identity piece of the work.
SARAH: And I appreciate that in talking about the nursing pipelines We are talking about other health professions. Even your own story of training in medicine and then moving to nursing um so really looking at the whole of the health system and not these individual parts as part of looking at those pipelines. So, let's move on now to our second core strategic initiative, which is reimagining public policy through data
In this area we want to increase access to data, improve data literacy and drive more informed statewide policy. We want to shift narratives with patients, advocates, and educators. It's healthcare institutions, government officials. We've certainly been doing work in this space, um, largely as a neutral convener, really trying to bring people together, sharing different perspectives, but we really want to center data in those conversations. So just to get us started, do you have any personal stories to share about your own practice and how maybe that shifted to policy?
DANIEL: One that comes to mind is work that I've done prior to me moving down to Philadelphia and working for Jefferson Health. As I participated on the Organization for Nurse Leaders Legislative Committee, and that's the professional organization for a group of states in New England, actually, that aligns with the American Organization for Nurse Leaders. Before that, I was a Vermont State Rep. On their board as well, and then transition to this legislative committee, and we did a ton of work supporting through evidence and data developing bill language that could be used to advocate at the state level for building pipeline funding for nurses in the state of Vermont.
That was a great, great example that I can think of my own personal story, and I also think of an example that comes to mind. Uh, when I participated in the American Organization for Nurse Leaders Advocacy Day, which is right in Washington, D. C. So that was a couple of years back. And I had the opportunity to speak with congressmen and congresswomen about increasing the healthcare workforce and protecting healthcare workers. And for all of those Bernie Sanders fans out there, I got to actually meet Bernie and talk with Bernie. Because he was, at the time when I was in Vermont, our state, well, still is our state representative, uh, Senator, but, uh, it was a pleasure to get to talk to him and share some of what the work he does and some of Peter Welch and other representatives in Vermont can do to help us from a nursing standpoint.
SARAH: So, from your perspective as a nurse executive, and I mean, as a nurse, what are some ways to have nurses get involved to be more active and inform statewide policy?
DANIEL: Well, generally, I think. The first step is just learn who your local state senators and representatives are. You should know that. Just got out of election season, so hopefully it's fresh on the mind. You know, and when there's an issue to advocate for, or there's something that you think that you're very passionate about, contact their office. Many of them make it very easy to just email them, email the legislator and their staff directly, send a query online, offer to meet with them to share your professional perspectives, which can actually be more impactful than you really think. And when you do that, not if, but when, really encourage you, tie it to a patient or a staff member story that's really relative to that issue at hand. You know, some examples of things you might want to write to your legislators are about, around staff safety, addressing nurse faculty and clinical site shortages, increasing the healthcare workforce, all the things that Sarah and I are here talking about. I'd also say, again, simple things here, practical and simple, to sign up to receive email updates from them and from your professional organizations. We're all members of professional organizations, whether it's leadership or just at the staff nurse level, or even outside of nursing. There's lots of professional organizations for respiratory therapists and physical therapists and occupational therapists, the list goes on.
And they all have their advocacy priorities that they have every year. You can go right onto their websites and go look them up, or you can sign up for those emails so you don't even have to go there. They just land right in your inbox. And I'd say get involved with your professional organizations. They really have these priorities. They have tools. They have resources. They even have templates that you can pull up, type in whatever you want to type, and then send that to your local senators or state representatives. And I'd say most importantly, don't think a conversation with your representative doesn't matter, or an email doesn't matter, because it does. It really, really does. So, I would say to sum that up, be intentional and take small steps, but take those steps.
SARAH: Yeah, and I really want to underscore what you were saying about, you know, don't underestimate your expertise. What I hear often from nursing students in particular is that they don't know what policy is, right? That's sort of a foreign area. And that's very problematic when it comes to creating a good policy, but also such a miss because there's so much information on that nurses have. And there's so much trust that nurses are able to, um, transfer, right? From the stories that they're, um, collecting and learning from, um, and to share those stories. There's a lot of trust in that and a lot of power in that. So, I appreciate you, you calling out how much nurses really do have to add to the conversation. So, we're going to move now into our final core strategic initiative. And now's as good a time as any to talk about how, um, our initiatives are really structured in a um, circular way because they're all overlapping.
They're all intersecting and you really can't do one area without another. But in this, uh, strategic initiative, we're looking at embracing diversity through equitable solutions. So again, Daniel, you're looking at quite a large system, a huge population of even the people who work for Jefferson, and then an even larger population of the people that Jefferson is serving. Share with us some of the ways that Jefferson Health is approaching diversity, uh, working to increase diversity in the nursing workforce and improving care delivery.
DANIEL: And we know, Sarah, that this is a topic that means a lot. It goes deep for a lot of people, and I say that because I just want to underscore how important it is.
As I mentioned before, and this might sound a little strange, but as we started to create that flexible RN SEAL team that I talked a little bit about. We really intentionally thought about diversity as we were building that team and the data kind of shows that. Out of our 140 RNs that provide care across our three regions on that SEAL team, 41.4 percent are underrepresented minorities. So, when you think about that, this is compared to a benchmark of around 28. 2%. So, we've almost doubled the benchmark from a diversity standpoint of the 140 nurses providing care across our 16 care sites right now. Additionally, that team is only, and I know I say only here, only 71.1 percent female. I know that sounds high, But when we talk about nursing, it's actually low, and that's compared to a national benchmark of 79. 1%. So you can see there that as we were building that team and being intentional about building that team, we were really thoughtful about the diversity we were trying to build into that team. And of course, that's not the only focus when we're hiring people and recruiting people. We're looking for skill. We're looking for the right fits, but it's an important variable. And I think that it shows that we're focused on that. Another area that we're really focused on in Jefferson Health within nursing is building strategic community partnerships.
We believe this is critical. We've partnered with local inner-city colleges that serve the underserved. One really practical example is we built a work-study program with an inner-city college that focused on entry-level positions like these patient care technicians that we have been talking about. And these students were able within their final year of high school to do a work study program as a PCT, which then helped them get into the local college. And then they got a job for us as a PCT. And so, you can see how that's really starting to serve our communities in which we're embedded. And I'll never forget the story I heard of one of the PCTs in this program recently. They shared that this PCT who is now in college So it's the first family member in college to go to college. It's also the first family member to hold a full-time job and get a real paycheck. And they shared how this paycheck now allows them to live in a more safe community, closer to where they work. And it's paying for the whole family to have an apartment. So, it's these types of, really personal impacts that we're having on our communities and it's in communities that are underserved and it's the type of investments that Jefferson Health knows we need to make, and I know there's other health care systems making these similar type of investments.
Finally, we're focused on embedding diversity and belonging into the core of who we are. And Sarah, you might say, well, how do you practically do that? The core of who you are, that sounds deep. Uh, well, one practical example is we went and looked at all of our job descriptions. And we made sure that the language within all of our job descriptions calls out the importance of having a diverse team that you work with and being competent and culturally aware of the different diverse individuals that we work with.
SARAH: And so how do you see, not just that example, but as a whole, how do you see those strategies translating into the type of care that's being delivered when we're looking at sort of culturally humble models of care?
DANIEL: I would say that it's good for someone who is sitting in a hospital bed. Or showing up to an ambulatory clinic and is really scared because they're there for the first time. How important is them to kind of see someone that looks like them, talks like them, and has some of the core values that they have. And so I think that's how it shows up is by our people looking like the people that we serve, at a very high, high level. I would say there's other practical ways it just shows up, right? So, at Jefferson Health, we have an extensive program around our patients having the ability to have translation services across ambulatory care sites, our urgent cares, and in our acute care hospitals. Extensive. It also shows up where we start thinking about, okay, we're going to have a clinic in a community, and we have to understand that community's cultures.
And this is a true story at Jefferson Health. We built a clinic, and the local community was afraid to actually go into it. And we did a lot of research, and it was because of the colors of the walls. And so that's how it shows up, right? We [00:33:00] had, if we would have known and done the right focus groups and done the right work up front, we wouldn't have painted the color of wall that we colored to open that up. And so easy fix. get that changed, and then we're able to really, again, practically just invite our communities into our different care sites to be able to provide the right care for them. So those are a few different examples. I also think it's really important, and we're doing this at Jefferson Health, to invite our patients onto committees. And have them be a part of decision making around policies and, right, finalizing job descriptions, things along those lines. Patient advisors are critical to the idea of how we're going to foster culturally humble care across our care sites.
SARAH: As we think about these initiatives and the role that the Pennsylvania Nursing Workforce Coalition can play, you know, we talk a lot about creating spaces for learning and to think about the sort of sustained impact, the collective impact of having those kinds of spaces. So as an advisory board member, what excites you about these opportunities?
DANIEL: Well, here at Jefferson, Sarah, our mission is to improve lives together, and I want to call out that word together. And so that's what really excites me about this opportunity. It's the together part. It might sound a little cliche. I know that. But it really is foundational to improving the lives of our communities. Like we have to do it together with them and with each other. So through a strong coalition that has like-minded individuals, like-minded mission, and focused on people and organizations that are part of our communities, I think we can make a difference as we're working together. We're making a difference as we continue to bring all of us together, share ideas, cross-pollinate. There is power in size. When we think about it the right way, and we do it the right way. So I really believe that's the power we have to forge together and chart our path forward.
SARAH: I think that's really well said. And, you know, looking more broadly at the future of what we do together, what excites you about the future of healthcare, the future of nursing, the future of healthcare?
DANIEL: I'd say, Sarah, that I have hope for health care. There's a lot of challenges right now. There's a lot of financial forces. There's a lot of regulatory headwinds right now for all of us.
But I also would say that it's in those challenges, and I know we learned this through COVID, we've even learned it through the most recent IV, uh, fluid shortage. It's in those challenges when we actually are forced to come together to think about how we're going to get through this together, because when everything's going great, we're over here on our islands and we're figuring it out by ourselves. But I really think we're an environment that's pushing us to think about how we do things together more and more and that that does excite me when I'm out there talking to nurses who are caring for our patients. They share stories where they're hopeful the world's not ending and health care is not falling apart and they're working together as teams even though the environments are challenging and they share stories of how they're going above and beyond despite you know all the workplace safety issues and let's call it what it is we have staffing challenges across the whole health care delivery system. Do we have a ton of work to do? Absolutely! Are we engaging the right people to help drive the change I think that's the question and I believe that we are.
And building coalitions like this and working together.
SARAH: So before we wrap up, do you have any final thoughts you want to share with our listeners?
DANIEL: This might sound cliche again, but it's simple, but it's impactful. I really encourage everyone to just start somewhere. That could be an email to a colleague, a Google search on how to recruit, uh, using innovation, like Google AI these days. Just try it out. Just be intentional and keep taking steps. You don't have to eat the whole elephant at once. You just need to take one step at a time. And you need to be able to encourage yourself to take a few risks. Just take a few risks. We don't evolve as humans without taking calculated risks. We all do it every day, whether we like it or not. You drive on the highway, you're taking a calculated risk. And finally I would say, as you're starting somewhere, just extend grace. This world needs so much grace right now, and it starts with me, starts with you, Sarah, and it starts with all of our listeners.
SARAH: Daniel, thank you so much for joining us on At the Core of Care. We are so excited to be working with you on the coalition.
DANIEL: Thanks, Sarah. It's been a pleasure to be able to spend time with you and share a little bit about our experiences at Jefferson, and hopefully, it's been helpful for our listeners.
SARAH: Special thanks to Daniel Hudson for joining us. And to all the members of the Pennsylvania Nursing Workforce Coalition's Advisory Board for their dedication and guidance as we mark this new and exciting chapter for our work. You can find our most recent and past episodes of At the Core of Care wherever you get your podcasts or at panursingworkforce.org. For more information about upcoming webinars and trainings for nurses to obtain continuing education credits, log on to nurseledcare.org. And on social media, you can stay up to date with us through our handle @ nurseledcare. At the Core of Care is produced by Stephanie Marudas of Kouvenda Media and mixed by Brad Linder.
I'm Sarah Hexem Hubbard of the Pennsylvania Nursing Workforce Coalition and the National Nurse-Led Care Consortium. Thanks for joining us.
