Chapter 04: From Mount Sinai Hospital to CNO and VP of Nursing Practice at MD Anderson
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Description
Dr. Porter begins this chapter by talking about her work as Chief Nursing Officer at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. She focuses on her work with the unions, a traditionally adversarial stakeholder, and explains how she was able to build a strong partnership. She notes that after 12 years in that role she was “ready for another adventure.”
Identifier
PorterC_02_20180125_C04
Publication Date
1-25-2018
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
Carol Porter, DNP, RN, FAAN, Oral History Interview, January 25, 2018
Topics Covered
The Interview Subject's Story - Professional Path; Leadership; On Leadership; Joining MD Anderson; Overview; Professional Path; Evolution of Career; Leadership; On Leadership; Professional Practice; The Professional at Work; Character, Values, Beliefs, Talents; Women and Minorities at Work
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
T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:
I just want to say for the record that it is four thirty-two on the 25th of January, 2018. I’m on the eighteenth floor, in the office of Dr. Carol Porter, and we’re having our second session together, revving up to talk about the experience of the institution during Harvey.
T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:
+ So, we kind of strategized and said we’d start today with you to tell the story about how you ended up coming to MD Anderson. How did that come about?
Carol Porter, DNP, RN, FAAN:
So, I was the Chief Nursing Officer at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Manhattan. I started there in 2004, as a Senior Director of Nursing Operations, and in 2005, became the Chief Nursing Officer and led the—it was a Magnet organization, and led them through two re-designations and had developed a Center for Nursing Research and Education within the medical school. I also developed the Global Nursing Leadership Academy, focused on international nursing leaders, with a group of people, it was very, very successful. I had worked with—it was a unionized environment. I had worked with our union partners and actually turned it around, quality focused, and actually presented podium presentations in Japan and other countries, with the presence of the unions, which was very unusual.
T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:
What is that unusual?
Carol Porter, DNP, RN, FAAN:
Because you’d have to have a very good relationship with the union partners in order for that to happen, and many times, union leadership and hospital leadership are adversarial. But I realized that I would not be able to lead union nurses unless I was working closely with union leadership, so I was able to work very—I included them at the table for all quality initiatives right away. So whenever we were doing anything on quality, I had the union leaders at the table helping me and working with me. And then became friendly with them, to a point where I really could be honest with them, very transparent, sharing data on quality and budget and finance and everything.
T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:
What would be some sources of conflict between union leadership and the hospital leadership?
Carol Porter, DNP, RN, FAAN:
My opinion is that sometimes it seems like a turf battle, but it really shouldn’t be, because you actually manage the same people. So as a Chief Nursing Officer, I had the actual title of the leader, but the union leaders, who were not employees of Mount Sinai, actually led the same nurses. So if you look at it that way, you have to really bond and work closely with those union leaders; otherwise, if you’re always battling, you’re going to confuse the nurses and you’re never going to get anything done.
T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:
So was the idea—and I just want to make sure I understand the context here. Would the idea be that a nurse would think oh, my hospital leadership has one set of concerns, my union has another set of concerns and commitment to me as an employee.
Carol Porter, DNP, RN, FAAN:
Right.
T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:
I see, okay.
Carol Porter, DNP, RN, FAAN:
Right. So they could get two sets of directions, versus if we are working together. If I’m working close together with the union leadership and we come together as a team, we even rounded together.
T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Wow.
Carol Porter, DNP, RN, FAAN:
So if we came together as a team and rounded together, it’s showing the nurses that we’re working together. The other thing is that not only were the nurses unionized but the nurses’ aides were unionized, and it was a different union, and I did the same exact thing with them. I worked closely with them, I would pull them in at the table, we would work on quality initiatives. And so when it got to when I was building the Nursing Leadership Academy and the Center for Nursing Research and Education, I included the union leaders in asking them what would they like to see in it, what do they think the nurses would like, even though I was asking them myself. Because it was focused on academics, the president of the union was always looking at when abstracts were due, and the first time she came into my office, when the international abstract was due, she came in about five o’clock in the afternoon. It was due Greenwich Mean Time, which we were trying to figure out what that was at the time and how much time we had to put this together. She had the idea but she didn’t know how to put it together, and so we did it together. I was on the computer, she was talking, I was adding and I was writing, and I believe the first one we did, and I can’t remember what exactly the time was, but I pushed send probably within thirty seconds of not knowing the deadline because all of a sudden it froze and I said, “Oh, we’ve missed the deadline.” But we didn’t miss the deadline. That was for the International Council of Nurses Congress in Japan, and we got accepted for podium presentation and so myself, the president of the union, and then in support, the union leadership of the union that supported the nurses’ aides all came. It was me, the only non-union leader, with six union leaders that were not employed at the hospital, they were employed by New York City. So that was a very unusual situation, because that doesn’t usually happen, and that was the beginning, and then we started to do other presentations together and we built a really strong partnership, I would say mostly focused on quality and a positive relationship. Every once in a while, they had to do something union-ish, but otherwise it was fine. So that was very important. [00:6:26]
T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:
What do you think enabled you to accomplish that? Everybody’s a different instrument.
Carol Porter, DNP, RN, FAAN:
Right.
T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:
What did you leverage in yourself to be able to do that?
Carol Porter, DNP, RN, FAAN:
It started with, as soon as I became the Chief Nursing Officer, within a week, I was in a meeting. The former CNO had left and then after a year they appointed me, and I was in a meeting where the president of the union was there. It was a meeting where the nursing directors and the union leadership got together once a month, and so it was my first meeting as a CNO, with them. I was kind of thinking, as things were happening, and I was explaining to them who I was, what I was—that I was now the Chief Nursing Officer, that I wanted to work closely with them and all that. The meeting was over and we started getting up, and I remember the union—the nursing union leader wasn’t nursing union leader, I mean a strong nursing union leader, not employed by the hospital, and I said to her out loud, it just came out of my mouth, it just came out, I said, “I will not be successful in my job unless you and I work together, because we lead the same group of nurses,” and you could hear like a pin drop and I thought oh my God, what did I just say? But it was true and I said, “So I need your help, I’m willing to partner with you if you’re willing to partner with me.” That was, I think the pivotal moment, because it was the first time that was ever said there.
T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:
How did she respond?
Carol Porter, DNP, RN, FAAN:
She was kind of shocked and she wasn’t quite sure if I really meant it, but she learned that I did mean it. I have developed a lot of good people skills. My background, when I was a clinical nurse and I was a trauma nurse, I think I honed my skills on how do you connect with people very fast, because sometimes patients would come in and wouldn’t have more than minutes to live, and so I learned how to make the most of whatever time they had, and how to connect with them, human being to human being, and I think because of that, from that point on, I’ve been able to do that. So I will usually find a way, even with the most difficult person, to find a way in, and then you have to prove yourself.
T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah.
Carol Porter, DNP, RN, FAAN:
So I think that, anyway, so we accomplished a lot. I was at a citywide level, doing presentations on behalf of collaborating with the unions, and I was—that piece was great. So after being there twelve years, I had done a lot and I started to—there wasn’t really a lot—I mean, I already had established the Center for Nursing Research and Education, that was in the School of Medicine. It was unusual, because we did not have a School of Nursing. I did that in collaboration with the dean of the medical school, after he—he wanted me to go through the whole AMC catalog, to see if any medical school had a Center for Nursing Research and Education in the medical school. I didn’t find any in the country, unless there was a university attached, and so we both decided it would be very innovative and very collaborative, and it would be a great thing. So I had done that and the research, the global leadership, the collaboration with the unions and changed the environment with teams, improved care. I’m very informal, nurses came up to me all the time to tell me the different things that they needed help with. So I felt that I was at a point where I’m ready for another adventure. This is great, I’ve had a great time, I’ve done a lot, but I think I have another adventure in me. And that’s when I started to look around and at that time, there were several academic chief nursing officer positions open in the country and I started to interview.
Recommended Citation
Porter, Carol DNP, RN, FAAN and Rosolowski, Tacey A., "Chapter 04: From Mount Sinai Hospital to CNO and VP of Nursing Practice at MD Anderson" (2018). Interview Chapters. 1378.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1378
Conditions Governing Access
Open
