Chapter 3: A Focus on Primary Nursing
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Description
Dr. Summers observes that she started in nursing at a key point when primary nursing practice was also beginning, and she selected a hospital that focused in this new area, taking a job taking care of orthopedic surgery patients. She talks her job at a medical surgical ICU and the mentors who encouraged her to think about her career and future, particularly as a leader in nursing.
Identifier
SummersB_01_20140123_C03
Publication Date
1-23-2014
Publisher
The Making Cancer History® Voices Oral History Collection, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
Barbara Summers, PhD, Oral History Interview, January 23, 2014
Topics Covered
The Interview Subject's Story - Professional PathThe Clinician Professional Path Mentoring Leadership
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Disciplines
History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Oncology | Oral History
Transcript
Barbara Summers, PhD:
So I selected a hospital specifically because they had implemented primary nursing as their framework. And I spent my first year working in a surgical unit, taking care of primarily orthopedic surgery patients, and then I applied for their critical care residency program, and I moved into the medical surgical ICU, and I worked there for a couple of years, had very good experiences there. In both of those situations I had wonderful managers, and both of them were mentors to me in different ways, but they provided me with guidance in how I should be thinking about my career and the future of my nursing practice.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I was just going to ask you about that, because it seems like you were making some pretty strategic decisions. So what is it that you were visualizing at the time?
Barbara Summers, PhD:
Oh, my god, what I was visualizing initially is I was going to get paid for taking care of patients. (Rosolowski laughs.) Like, wow, this is great! I have my license. I’m going to get paid for taking care of patients. I’m happy, I love being a nurse, and I wasn’t thinking beyond the next day. I loved my patients. I loved my colleagues. It was all great, but I wasn’t thinking about school or anything. I felt that a year of experience on the orthopedic unit and then talking with my manager who said, “I support you. You should go to the ICU. It’s going to be a good challenge for you. It’s going to develop skills that you’re going to need to have,” I then went to the ICU and, as I said, practiced there a couple of years. But I had been there maybe six months when my manager called me into her office one day and told me that I needed to apply for and get into graduate school and get my master’s degree, because I was very smart and I had many opinions, but if I didn’t learn how to channel them correctly, I was going to get in trouble a lot. (laughs)
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What were some of the opinions that she was talking about at that time?
Barbara Summers, PhD:
You know, I was very clear in my mind about the standard of nursing practice and how nurses should deliver care to patients and the way that they should interact with patients and other nurses and physician, and the way nurses should document their care and the thoroughness with which they should conduct their assessments. I had an opinion about everything. So, you know, that’s all great, but if one doesn’t know what to do with that energy, then you can become a real pain in the behind for your co-workers and for your manager. So, yeah, Ann Lockhart, she was my manager in the ICU, she sat me down and said, “You need to go back to graduate school or else you’re going to get in a lot of trouble.” (laughs)
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
So I’m getting the sense that you had pretty high standards about that.
Barbara Summers, PhD:
I did. I had very high standards, and it’s not that I was working with nurses who were not good nurses, but I needed to learn how to more effectively work as a leader and recognize that I had—I tended to be viewed as an informal leader within a work group, and that that is lovely, but it also has a lot of responsibility with it, that you have to accept that informal leader role and understand that that gives you an obligation to use that authority as an informal leader effectively and positively.
Recommended Citation
Summers, Barbara PhD and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 3: A Focus on Primary Nursing" (2014). Interview Chapters. 1240.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1240
Conditions Governing Access
Open
