Crystal Bricker

I would attribute my success to a few things. Again, I have an amazing family around me, and my husband and children have been my biggest cheerleaders, my biggest supporters. Throughout my career, for me to be able to grow, there's been a sacrifice on both my end and their end. Sometimes I wasn't able to attend a key event for my kids. Sometimes my husband would have to step in and take care of things at home so that I could have room to make sure that I was passing my classes. With every single milestone, it's been that. It's also been people who have seen a potential in me when I haven't been able to really see it myself. It's those people that really saw something in me and really kind of pushed me to continue that growth and development. With them and their support, that has really helped me to be successful in the endeavors that I've had. When I decided I wanted to go back to school for my master's degree, we sat all my kids down and said, hey, you know, I just want to let you know that I'm considering going back to school, which means some of my time is gonna be tied up. And, ironically enough, it shocked me. My son actually said, well, Mom, we don't know any different. And I thought about that. It made me sad, but at the same time, it was like, oh, this is what they know. I went through going through undergraduate school all while they were still relatively little and in grade school.

The best career advice I've ever received is to keep on learning and growing. No one ever arrives. There's always something to learn, something to do to help promote your own personal growth, no matter what your chosen profession is. Going back to my dad, that was just something he always did. He transformed his career over the years with that same philosophy of always being open to learning something new, or stretching yourself to grow, because you could coast along, or you could continue to get better and better at what you do. In a lot of the leadership training that I've had both through my professional organization and through the hospital system I work for, it's always been about what can we do to help you continue to learn and grow, and I've inspired that in others as well. It's not just, okay, you're doing really well at your job, but what things you want to continue to work on? What are some things that you see as key opportunities while leveraging your strengths? Are you good at communicating with others? Taking those strengths, but also identifying those things that really are a little bit out of your comfort zone and making sure that you're looking for those opportunities to take those things out of your comfort zone and bring it more into the things that you are more comfortable doing.

I would tell them that they can be influential from day one. Stepping into that space, wanting to become a nurse, I always tell new graduate nurses that are starting with us that you can be a part of shaping your practice. You guys come in and you guys see new things that maybe you have questions about that spark something that, when you ask the question, maybe I don't know exactly why we still do it that way, but you've got a keen eye, and you don't have to wait until you've been in nursing for years to be able to make meaningful contributions. It's getting involved in your nursing professional organizations. It's working hard to continually grow yourself, but also look for ways to stretch yourself, to grow, to be a part of shaping your practice, whether it be on the legislative end, looking at different bills that are being introduced that are going to determine how we practice, and having a voice and speaking up. Or it could just be simply as wanting to make a quality improvement change in the area that you work. You can be influential from day one.

I would say the biggest challenges in nursing, and specifically perioperative nursing, is always trying to make sure that we are balancing providing excellent quality care, which we never want that to wane, with available resources, and making sure that we are providing the quality care that we would want to give our family members while understanding some of the constraints. I know that there's been a lot out on making sure that we have appropriate nurse staffing versus patient ratios and other challenges that come forward. But I do know that nurses having a seat at the table is so important, and the big challenge is having enough nurses being willing to step up and say, I want to have a seat at the table. I want to provide my insight so that that can be used to make things better and move things forward. It's incredibly difficult. I hear a lot of nurses say, oh, well, I'm not political, and it's, yeah, maybe you're not one of those that looks into everything that's being looked at, changed and all that stuff with healthcare, but I always tell, and this is the big thing that I always say, either you have a seat at the table, and you are actually voicing that, or you're not. It's not about being political or not. By not being, by saying you're not political, you really are being political, because you're letting somebody else make decisions for you. We don't have enough nurses that are getting themselves seats at the table to be able to provide our own insight into decisions that are being made to us. Healthcare, we know, is, there's a lot of good and bad going on with healthcare right now, but nurses are the largest part of the healthcare profession in the United States. There's power in that, but we have to wield it, and if we don't, then again, we end up in a place where decisions are being made for us. That's probably the biggest challenge is helping nurses and nursing as a profession as a whole understand that we really do need to own our practice, and part of that is being actively involved in shaping how healthcare is developed moving forward.

As far as values, I think as a professional and as a person individually, I think integrity is important. I think that people need to be able to rely on you and understand that you're going to always do the right thing, so integrity is something that I hone in on. And also, I value family. Family is incredibly important to me, and that's not just the blood relatives that I have, but there's a lot of people that have surrounded me throughout my whole life that maybe aren't blood relatives, but have really been there to help me celebrate the wins and really support me in the times that maybe weren't so great. I know that a lot of where I've come over the years has stemmed directly from those that have been very supportive of me and helped me through, navigate a lot of things in life.