Jodi Dietzel

I attribute my success to good mentoring. I had some really good mentors, both women and men, some really good female and male mentors that guided me early in my career, which really helped me get to where I am today. Having those mentors who invested in me early on made all the difference in my professional journey.

The best advice that I've gotten from a lot of physicians and other leaders is just that no matter what, if you put the patient first in everything we do, we can't really go wrong. I circle that around with my teams a lot, too. I'll ask, where's the patient in this? Let's put them first, and then figure it out from there. I think people get caught up in how things affect them personally, and sometimes I have to redirect them around to thinking about the patient first, and then we'll go from there.

My advice to young women entering nursing is that there are so many opportunities in nursing. It's not just taking care of a patient at the bedside. You can do education, you can go into leadership roles, there are so many different specialties. I feel like the sky's the limit with nursing. You can go all the way up to being a CNO. There are just so many opportunities for nurses in these roles.

The biggest challenges in healthcare right now are the changes in healthcare that have been challenging to keep up with. One major challenge is that there are fewer physicians coming out into the practice world. It's hard when you're trying to recruit primary care providers, and there are fewer and fewer wanting to do rural primary care. They want to be making money in the ICU as intensivists or hospitalists rather than in an ambulatory setting, so that's been challenging in making sure we have providers to take care of the patients that we want to serve. We also have a huge shortage in all aspects of healthcare. We don't have enough medical assistants, we don't have enough registered nurses coming out anymore. We've really seen a decline in that, and the impact of COVID probably didn't help either. A lot of people switched careers during COVID because they were scared and didn't want to do healthcare anymore. Trying to build that base back up has been a little challenging. As for opportunities, I'm at the director-administrator level, so there are opportunities for vice president roles or president roles that could be in my field.

I would say trust and respect are the most important values to me. I feel like if I don't have the trust of my teams or my people, it's really hard to lead them, so trust and respect probably rise to the top for me. I'm also a super transparent person. As I lead, part of my leadership is just being very transparent with people about where we're at, where we need to be, and involving them in decisions.