Kate Downing

Honestly, I credit my parents. They had a tremendous work ethic, and they very much came from humble beginnings themselves, and they valued work. I was fortunate - I really grew up in a house where they didn't care if you were serving french fries at McDonald's or you were the CEO of the company. Show up every day with the same passion to do well and to do that job the best you could, and that really was imparted in me. That has been my approach, and I think that's why I've been successful, because I've approached every position that I've gone into with that type of a positive spin. Public health nursing was probably one of the biggest challenges because there was a lot of strife and it's a political position, but I think just going in with that positive attitude came solely from my parents, really thumping that work ethic into us - work hard, do a really good job at whatever it is you decide to do, and always be seeking how to do it a little bit better. How are you gonna make a difference? How are you gonna leave that in better shape than when you came in?

The best career advice I ever received was while I was in one of my leadership roles from my own AVP, after I had really blown something - like, I'm talking, I had blown it. She sat down across from me, and she used to call me Cha-Cha, and she said, 'So cha-Cha, you know what happened here?' And I listed off everything I helped happen, and she said, 'Nope. I'm gonna give you a little piece of advice. You have to always inspect what you expect. And you just didn't do that.' That resonated so strongly with me, and I took that forward. Not only do I do that in my personal life now, but I do it professionally. I don't just make assumptions, and I follow through. It really heightened my follow-through. I can't just rest back and think, well, I made that call and they're gonna call me back. Now it's just making sure that I have strong follow-through, that my communication is crystal clear. In my leadership role, it was more relative because I had clinical managers that reported directly into me and I was responsible for the rest of the staff. If I would give a directive to my clinical manager, what I learned is it wasn't just enough to assume that they were going to do it. I needed to circle back, make sure that had been done, take it a step forward, and spot check things. Not micromanagement, because there's a very big difference between inspecting what you expect and micromanaging.

Be curious. Be willing to question what you don't understand, what doesn't seem right to you, and remember why you went into the profession - that hopefully you went into nursing because you wanted to make a difference, you wanted to help. So just stay curious, stay willing to question things that don't seem right. And be brave. Because nowadays, you have to be brave. You have to muster every ounce of courage to challenge a doctor when you know the doctor may not have given it the due diligence, reading a chart or doing something.

The biggest challenges that I see come from, honestly, the lack of nurses. We're coming into a huge nursing shortage - less people are going into nursing, and those that do go into nursing that are at the bedside are very quickly looking to become nurse practitioners or to get those advanced degrees, which I understand, but it's leaving a huge deficit for those bedside nurses. We're really working in a gap right now where we need to be more enticing for nurses to want to come into the profession. I think some of what we need to do is look at what COVID taught us - our jobs can be done in a lot of different ways. Obviously, in hospital settings you need boots on the ground, you need to be there, but let's work, let's do more job co-sharing, and let's work better to do better hours, come up with more accommodating hours, be more flexible, and increase the pay for nurses. You have a lot of areas where nurses are really not making very good money, and they are often the ones that are receiving that patient first, taking care of that patient, seeing those subtle changes, saving those patients' lives. They are ultimately responsible for so much. So we need to look bigger at how can we make shifts more appealing. Is it shorter shifts? And that might have to change from region to region, facility to facility. We, as leaders in those facilities and agencies across the country, need to be doing deep dives into how are we going to take care of our patients, but also take care of our staff. And what does that look like here? Because it's not going to be the same throughout the country.

Compassion. Be compassionate. Be humble. And be authentic. Those three values are most important to me. It really comes down to just be a good human. It sounds simplistic, but just be a good human and take care of each other.