Have you ever wondered what it’s like to work with psychiatric patients?
Surely, it’s not like many movies and television shows have portrayed. Not even close.
To get more information about becoming a psychiatric nurse, we interviewed Jessica Martinez, RN, a Behavioral Health Registered Nurse working on CareRev’s platform at Bergen New Bridge Medical Center in Paramus, New Jersey.
What follows is our interview, edited for length and clarity.
Jessica Martinez, RN, is a Behavioral Health Registered Nurse at Bergen New Bridge Medical Center in Paramus, New Jersey
How did you get interested in working as a psychiatric nurse? What drew you to it? How long have you been doing it?
My mentor from nursing school was a psychiatric nurse instructor, and she told me she thought I should try it. She helped me get my first job.
I fell in love with it after working as a psychiatric nurse. That was in 2019, and I still really love this area of medicine.
Briefly explain what you do as a psychiatric nurse. What types of patients do you serve—what ages and how are they approved to be in the program? What do you provide for them?
As a psychiatric nurse, I assist patients from ages five to 105 with a mental health diagnosis who have been admitted to the hospital.
I ensure patients and staff stay safe, and a big part of the job is administering medications so patients can return to their daily lives. I work with patients to help reduce the stigma of their mental health challenges and help them understand it is a chronic condition that can be treated.
Some of my patients–once they start their medication and begin to feel better–think they don’t need their meds anymore. As a result, I work with patients in a group therapy setting to help them understand they have a diagnosis and that the best way to deal with it is to follow the doctor’s orders.
Did you need to get additional education to become a psychiatric nurse?
I earned an associate degree in 2018 and a bachelor’s degree in 2022, and I’m currently pursuing a master’s degree.
You can do this job with an associate degree, but a bachelor’s is preferred.
What do you like most about working in your job?
My favorite part is seeing patients get better and feel more like themselves. I work with patients to help them develop new routines for improved health and wellness. When a patient is ready to go home, that is the best feeling in the world.
I work in the hospital through CareRev, a technology platform that allows me to maintain my schedule based on what is going on in my life. I can build my work schedule around my life, not the other way around. This has helped balance my work and personal lives, pays well enough for me to travel, and allows me time to schedule a break when needed.
What are your biggest challenges?
Sometimes, patients are frustrated, but we work hard to ensure everyone navigates to a healthy outcome.
What are your greatest rewards in your work?
The biggest reward is working directly with patients and knowing that every day is different. I’m constantly learning and growing in my role.
Is there anything else that is important for our readers to know?
Nursing has changed a lot. I work through CareRev’s platform, where I work side-by-side with hospital professionals daily. However, I have the flexibility to control my schedule so I can pursue further education, accommodate my family’s needs, and pick up shifts close to home.
We need more nurses going into psychiatry. It’s a field that has changed so much, and so has society’s understanding of mental health challenges.
Oncology nurses at the John Theurer Cancer Center (JTCC) in Hackensack, NJ, are making a difference in the lives of cancer patients.
Margaret Hopkins, RN, is one of those nurses, and she feels blessed every day to be a part of such a fantastic team. As a cancer survivor herself, Hopkins has been on both sides of cancer treatment and knows the magic of the work at JTCC. In her decades of nursing, she’s never felt more appreciated for her work.
So Hopkins submitted JTCC for the Oncology Nursing Society (ONS) 2024 Outstanding Employer Award. And just in time for the holidays – JTCC received word that it was a winner. It was a true gift for the oncology nurses who give their time and talents to help cancer patients every day.
The ONS 2024 Outstanding Employer Award recognizes employers who support their oncology nurses. The honor further distinguishes JTCC as a place where innovative technology, individualized, advanced treatment, and outstanding, caring staff members save lives. At a time when medical facilities are facing nursing shortages, this award shows these oncology nurses believe JTCC is a great place to work.
Daily Nurse is proud to name the oncology nurses at the John Theurer Cancer Center in Hackensack, NJ, as the Nurses of the Week for being among the best in the nation, working to ensure optimal patient outcomes with compassion, competence, and strength the nursing profession is renowned for.
“I am proud to be here. I know I can continue to learn and grow. I feel at home,” Hopkins adds.
These nurses believe that the JTCC is an excellent place to work, especially at a time when medical facilities are facing nursing shortages.
“We welcome nurses from all experiential backgrounds to work with us. The fundamental desire to support our patients through the fight of their lives is what makes a good candidate for these positions at JTCC,” says Linda Casey, MHA, BSN, RN, OCN, NE-BC, Director of Nursing Operations at JTCC.
The support and appreciation these nurses receive at JTCC are second to none, from the extensive orientation program, encouragement to receive additional certifications, an open-door policy exhibited by the leadership team, and an annual day celebrating their nationally certified nurses.
It’s no surprise that the JTCC joins the ranks of outstanding institutions and past recipients, including the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, MA. The recognition shows that JTCC’s compassionate nurses like Hopkins feel as appreciated for their work as their patients feel cared for.
Nominate a Nurse of the Week! Every Wednesday, DailyNurse.com features a nurse making a difference in the lives of their patients, students, and colleagues. We encourage you to nominate a nurse who has impacted your life as the next Nurse of the Week, and we’ll feature them online and in our weekly newsletter.
Three members of Girl Scout Troop 96028 from Maywood, NJ, brought smiles to the faces of countless frontline healthcare workers at Hackensack University Medical Center recently when they delivered hundreds of “Smile Goody Bags.”
The scouts raised money by posting a “Have You Thanked a Nurse Today”plea on social media. With the donated money, they purchased special snacks, soothing self-care products, and an array of other surprises, which they stuffed into hundreds of special gift bags – adorned with a smile sticker – and hand-delivered to the delight of the hospital workers.
“I just don’t think nurses get enough appreciation,” says Sarah McAdams, one of three Girl Scouts who came up with the idea as part of a project to earn the Scouts Silver Award – the second-highest award of the Girl Scouts of the USA and the highest award that a Girl Scout Cadette can achieve.
Three members of Girl Scout Troop 96028 from Maywood, NJ, brought smiles to the faces of nurses at Hackensack University Medical Center when they delivered hundreds of “Smile Goody Bags” (Photo credit: Hackensack University Medical Center)
“My aunt is a nurse, and I know how stressful it was for her during COVID,” explains Scout Grace Neilsen. She says this project was personal for her and that making nurses happy was important.
“Achieving the Silver Award shows that the Scout is a leader who is organized, determined, and dedicated to improving their community – all things these three young women have demonstrated,” says Dena Egbert, MSN, RN, NE-BC, Administrative Director of Nursing at Hackensack University Medical Center. “This was a major undertaking from the fundraising to the facilitating of the delivery, and our nurses certainly appreciate all their efforts.”
“This has been an incredible experience,” says Scout Gabriella Jaskot. “As a society, we depend on our nurses, and to thank them in person was greatly rewarding.”
In the Covid era, we often hear (and can’t help but understand) that older nurses, resources exhausted by their pandemic ordeal, are retiring early. Nurse of the Week Mercedes “Mercy” Kallal, RN, however, has been a nurse for over half a century now and at 83 years old she just isn’t ready to hand in her stethoscope. She tried once, about a dozen years ago, but even after working the Covid-19 frontlines—in her 80s, mind—there’s no evidence that Kallal might be running out of steam.
By now, it’s hard to imagine the post-anesthesia care unit (PACU) at New Jersey’s Jefferson Washington Township without the diminutive RN (Mercy is barely five feet tall). Fortunately, Kallal finds her work so meaningful that she’s in no hurry to hang a “Gone Fishing” sign on her door. “As long as I am mentally and physically able, I would love to dedicate my remaining life to taking care of patients … and help[ing] people,” she told the Philadelphia Inquirer. The Daisy Award winning RN seems to thrive on helping staff as well as patients; she’s the first person they call when someone needs a holiday or evening off, and the hospital even lauds her willingness to “help… younger co-workers balance life and work.” Jefferson Washington VP of Operations Autum Shingler-Nace happily describes Mercy as “A nurse’s nurse.”.
“What the heck is this? I was supposed to become a nun.”
This does not mean that Kallal is an ascetic lady-with-a-lamp who lives only for her patients. She has been a widow for years, but always has plenty to do. When off duty, she loves to travel, hit some casinos, and watch horse races. To wind down, she works in her garden.
Nonetheless, nursing truly is the life calling of this small gambler. In fact, Mercy’s husband entered her life as one of her patients.
After Arthur Kallan was discharged from the hospital, the feisty little nurse who had cared for him loomed large in his mind. Initially, when her former patient began to call and said that he missed her, Mercy was nonplussed, to say the least. The devout Roman Catholic recalled, “I thought, ‘What the heck is this? I’m supposed to become a nun.’ But we started dating.” In fact, the match worked out so well that she acquired her fondness for horse races from her patient-turned-spouse.
Kallal’s nursing career began in the Philippines, where she graduated from nursing school, and ventured to the United States in 1969. When she and a few fellow grads landed in Philadelphia, the newly arrived nurse says, “They put me in charge of 32 patients, and when I asked why, they said it was because I had a big mouth… I didn’t know the idiomatic expression, so I took it literally.”
After that, the nurse gravitated to Newark. Apparently, her mouth was not quite the right size yet for New Jersey (there is a checkpoint when one enters the state), so before long Mercy returned to Philly and picked up a range of nursing experience, including a VA hospital, a nun-managed nursing home, and finally, the heart transplant unit at Temple University, where she settled for two and a half decades.
“We keep thinking she’ll slow down a bit, but she keeps picking up more shifts.”
As she completed her 25th year at Temple, though, Mercy decided that she had had enough and DID retire… for a bit less than a year.
It was a delight to indulge in nearly 11 months of travel, but her savings began to dwindle, and now in her 50s, she still had an overabundance of energy and nursing beckoned to her once more. Widowed and living alone with no immediate family in the US, she took stock and thought it was time to work again “before I become a pauper,” and besides, “I live[d] by myself now. How much can you clean?”
By this point in her life, Kallal’s mouth must have been just the right size for NJ and the hospital now operating as Jefferson Washington Township was a mere 5-minute drive from her home (another reason she’s everyone’s go-to when someone needs to be covered). Into her 70s by then, Mercy began by taking things slowly and worked part-time, but that didn’t last for long. As a PACU co-worker told the Inquirer, “We keep thinking she’ll slow down a bit, but she keeps picking up more shifts.”
Patients, Mercy is not here for your careless risks
Since then, in addition to becoming known for her willingness to cover shifts whenever possible, Kallal is the unofficial PACU Health Martinet. She does not hold back when patients are disruptive, abusive, or take dangerous risks, and co-workers have been known to shamelessly throw particularly difficult charges on their Mercy. Her view: “I’m very strict and I explain to the patient that this is the way it has to be. You have to listen to your nurse.” But she adds, “And before they leave, they give me a hug and a kiss.” The kind-but-firm Philippine-born RN also meets any misguided obstinacy over masking or vaccination head-on—or something like that: ”I tried to explain getting vaccinated to one patient and she just looked at me like I had two heads. But at least I did my job as a nurse.”
To read the full story—and see more pithy Mercy quotes—click here.
The nursing staff on the 9 Pavilion West oncology unit at the Hackensack University Medical Center (HUMC) in New Jersey knows that hair loss can be one of the most difficult side effects of cancer treatment for patients to come to terms with. Female patients in particular tend to express feelings of sadness and sometimes loss of identity.
9 Pavilion West nurse Audrey Waechter, BSN, RN, though, is in a position to give patients an old Hollywood-style headdress. Waechter sometimes covers her own hair with beautiful scarves at work. Over the last few months, Audrey noted she was getting more frequent compliments on the scarves as well as questions from patients asking her where she purchased them and how to artfully wrap them.
“Oncology allows me to develop lasting relationships with my patients.”
Seeing how happy and confident the scarves made her patients, Audrey had an idea. She decided to write instructions on how to wrap the scarves to achieve different looks. Her colleagues Kathryn Frattarola, RN, Jessica Pollack, RN, Cecola Steele-Odondi, NA, and Jenna DiGiacinto, RN helped out to model the looks that were captured in photographs. The instructions and photos were used to create an easy-to-follow pamphlet for patients experiencing hair loss from chemotherapy.
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Additionally, Audrey generously purchased 20 new scarves to donate to patients to be given out with the pamphlet. With management in full support of this initiative – named Bare It or Wear It – Audrey will be training any team members on the unit who are interested in learning how to wrap scarves. Those team members will in turn be able to personally teach patients. Marking the journey of our oncology patients is important and hair loss is a significant part of it,” said Jenna.
9PW Nurse Manager Meg Orzechowski said, “Audrey is very passionate about being an oncology nurse and she often expresses that it was a true calling for her to move into this specialty. Her Bare It or Wear It initiative is just one example of how Audrey goes above and beyond for her patients to make them feel comforted during such a difficult time. I am excited to watch this initiative expand as patients have immediately expressed their gratitude and excitement for the scarves as they help them look a little more like themselves and a little less sick.”
She adds, “There are no more beautiful souls in this world than those who bring beauty to others. Much gratitude and congratulations to Audrey for bringing this lovely initiative to life. To all the caregivers on 9PW, our heartfelt thanks, and appreciation.”
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“Oncology allows me to make a difference in the lives of people enduring cancer – no matter their race or color,” said Audrey. “It is rewarding to care for such a special population of patients where I am able to show my compassionate side. Being in Oncology also allows me to develop lasting relationships with my patients. I have created an avenue to help ease the emotional and physical frustrations experienced particularly by my female patients who are experiencing hair loss.”
This initiative helps to educate and provide different options of headwear for patients who have lost their hair due to cancer treatments. The oncology team says it has helped to boost their confidence and for them to feel beautiful once again.
Managing any nursing team carries its challenges, and the pandemic has added even more complexity to that formidable task. With such a daunting landscape, how do nurse leaders enable a nursing organization to perform at a high level, and what steps are needed to get there?
In developing a high-performing nursing culture, nurse leaders need to focus on two things, notes Courtney Vose, DNP, MBA, RN, APRN, NEA-BC, FAAN, senior vice president and chief nursing officer at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital. The first is “truly driving employee engagement.” The second is to “really drive for RN satisfaction.”
Vose started her role in late January. Previously, Vose served as vice president and chief nursing officer in the New York-Presbyterian Hospital system.
Courtney Vose, senior VP and chief nursing officer.
“From a nursing leadership perspective,” says Vose, “I feel that if we take better care of our staff, they can take better care of patients and their families. The benefit of creating an engaged culture is that outcomes should improve in every domain, from quality to satisfaction to flow to affordability. When you have a high-performing team, they want to perform well in all domains.”
When it comes to employee engagement, “it’s really helping to create a shared vision and developing the strategy with the voice of the team from all levels and disciplines so that there’s a shared sense of purpose and direction on where we want to go,” says Vose
At New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center, employee engagement scores rose so quickly that Gallup, who measured these scores, wanted to know what they were doing. “At the end of the day, it was really very simple,” Vose says. “We listened to the collective voice of all team members. We created a shared vision that everyone got aligned to, and then we developed our strategy and then tactics on how we were going to get there.”
“If I were to boil it down, I would say create a shared vision that gives people a sense of purpose. And then really dig into that to figure out how you’re going to get there and then take action to make it happen.”
RN satisfaction, notes Vose, is tied to employee engagement since it is a key component of engagement. Satisfaction measures how much employees enjoy their work. Components of this for nurses include autonomy in their practice and access to professional development opportunities.
Vose notes that the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC) Magnet Recognition Program is related to high-performing nursing organizations. “Magnet organizations invest more in nursing. The evidence strongly suggests Magnet organizations have higher engagement and RN satisfaction, which leads to better results for patients and families.”
Learning from the pandemic
The pandemic holds lessons for creating a high-performing nursing organization, notes Vose. One involves resilience. “How we provide respite and keep a workforce resilient is an incredibly important learning,” she notes.
A second lesson involves creating new models of care that allow nursing to become more “elastic,” says Vose. “That’s my word for how can we expand our workforce quickly when we have an event that requires more resources.”
At Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, nursing students from Rutgers University School of Nursing assisted staff nurses during the Omicron wave. This allowed RNs to delegate to the nursing students and take better care of patients and families.
“So how could we utilize students all the time?” asks Vose. “Why do we have to wait for a pandemic to do that? How could we utilize licensed practical nurses who could be delegated to and allow us to take care of more patients, especially when the time comes when we really need additional resources? Those are the things that the nursing community at large is really engaged in trying to figure out.”
No need to “complexify”
In developing a high-performing nursing organization, nurse leaders should avoid the tendency to “complexify” leadership, says Vose. “I think leadership is actually fairly easy, but the work is hard with long hours,” she says.
Many nurse leaders, says Vose, make the mistake of wanting to jump into higher-functioning activities before they’ve established trust with their team. “Establishing trust with your workforce is probably the most important thing that you can do as a leadership team,” says Vose. “Until you have that, it’s hard to get to the next levels where you would engage and empower them to really take ownership of their practice and make decisions about their practice environment.” If it takes a year to develop that trust “then take the year to do that because it will be a year well spent.”
Leadership, Vose notes, will set standards. “But for me, it’s always trust and respect first, however long that takes to establish, moving quickly into engaging and empowering leaders and staff. Once you have those two solid foundations in place, you can achieve anything that you want to.”
After Arthur Kallan was discharged from the hospital, the feisty little nurse who had cared for him loomed large in his mind. Initially, when her former patient began to call and said that he missed her, Mercy was nonplussed, to say the least. The devout Roman Catholic recalled, “I thought, ‘What the heck is this? I’m supposed to become a nun.’ But we started dating.” In fact, the match worked out so well that she acquired her fondness for horse races from her patient-turned-spouse.
