Nurse Innovators are Agents of Change

By Jordie Papa

Image courtesy of Picpedia

Anyone who has spent even a little time in nursing realizes that modern medicine is all about innovation.  Medical technologies and procedures that were once considered science fiction are now commonplace in US hospitals.  More innovations occur every year in biotechnology than practically any other industry today.  So, it should come as no surprise that there exists a branch of nursing dedicated to exploring and exploiting medical innovation.

The Army of Arnie’s

Registered Nurse Innovators, influencers and entrepreneurs, otherwise known as RNIIE (pronounced Arnie), dedicate their professional lives to benefit nurses everywhere by exploring cutting edge medical technologies, then sharing this knowledge with nurses of all stripes.  More than just working nurses, Arnies go above and beyond the call of duty to help raise the bar.  Their opinions are highly sought and their ability to learn adapt and teach some of the latest medical breakthroughs is what sets them apart from the herd.  Some are so respected that they are asked to help develop new treatment protocols.

Tara Barr Raises the Bar on Stroke Treatment

Image courtesy health.mil

A stroke occurs every 40-seconds in this country.  The difference between recovery and complications in many cases has to do with correctly diagnosing the stroke in the first place.  Many patients initial symptoms are all too easily misdiagnosed as hypertension or migraine headaches.  For every minute that passes after a stroke takes place, 2 million neurons die.  Any delay in detecting and treating a stroke means the patient can suffer a deficit to speech, memory and movement.  Wait too long and death is usually the result.  Having been an ICU nurse, Barr was all too familiar with head injuries which may or may not have been strokes.  Usually all she could do was tell patients and family members to wait since it took time to determine the answers.  This was time that many stroke victims did not have.  After going back to school to get her PhD, she became a post-doctoral fellow who led a traumatic injury study on active duty service members.  This led her to becoming the Chief Science Officer at Valtari Bio where she was developed two new diagnostic tools that quickly help determine the onset of stroke as well as determining the type of stroke a patient is having.  

Watching Out for the Watchers

Image courtesy wikimedia

Disasters and nurses go together like a hand in a glove.  That’s because when a disaster is declared, nurses are in great demand.  The problem is that once the disaster is over, it’s often these same nurses who are the most traumatized by the event.  In 2017, there were more than 120 federal disasters declared in this country alone.  During several of them, including the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey that devastated Texas, nurses from across the country were called in to help.  Hundreds of nurses responded and many were affected by what they saw to the point were some were affected by post-traumatic stress disorder.  While officials were quick to call for help, until recently, nurses who themselves needed help after volunteering for disaster relief, had nowhere to go.  In 2018, Danita Alfred RN PhD, a nursing professor at the University of Texas, listened to some of the volunteers stories and decided to do something about it.  Securing a grant from the Johnson & Johnson Foundation, she and other nurses with disaster relief experience created a collection of free online resources designed to help prepare nurses for the realities of disaster relief and its aftermath.  Called Care for the Caregiver, which contains a wealth of blogs and videos that deal with every aspect of disaster relief as it relates to nurses.

https://www.texasnurses.org/page/c4c

Nurse MacGyver to the Rescue

Roxana Reyna, RN has healing in her DNA.  This Texan comes from a family of healers, including, including her great-grandmother who was known to concoct herbal remedies to take to ranchers to treat wounds and ailments long before the NIH was ever formed.  For more than two decades, Reyna has helped develop pediatric care solutions at Driscoll Children’s Hospital in Corpus Christi.  At least one of the treatments she helped pioneer would have made her great grandma proud.  Children with omphalocele are born with some of their abdominal organs outside the body.  Since this condition sometimes requires that the patient wait up to a year for corrective surgery, the translucent sac that keeps the exposed organs from becoming infected needs to be protected.  In 2008, Reyna came up with a solution that combined different types of surgical dressings to help protect the fragile membrane.  Her innovation was so successful that many of the infants born with the defect are allowed to go home in less than 2-weeks, instead of being forced to remain hospitalized for months.  So impressive was her achievement, that she was invited to the White House in 2014 to take part in the Maker-Faire where she had the opportunity to rub elbows with other innovators. You can read the article about her experience there by clicking the link below.

https://www.healthleadersmedia.com/nursing/im-macgyver-says-nurse-honored-white-house

Do you know any nurse innovators?

When it comes to keeping other nurses up to date and on the beam when it comes to modern medicine, who is better qualified than nurse influencers, innovators and entrepreneurs?  It’s though the actions of RNIIE’s that the practice of nursing is destined to become much more important and necessary to the advancement of medical care in the 21^st Century. 

Jordie Papa is owner of Uniform Destination with four locations in North Florida.