Her Story
About Tiffany
I started my nursing journey at age 18 as an LPN after graduating from Carl Barton High School in Brooklyn, New York. I worked through college and got my RN at Herbert H. Lehman College in the Bronx in 2005. I spent almost 8 years at bedside as an RN at New York Methodist Hospital (now New York Brooklyn Methodist Hospital) in a medical surgical stepped-down unit while earning my master's degree as a family nurse practitioner. I then moved into outpatient settings, working in transitional care and eventually running the Hospital Medical Home program, a national quality reporting program. I stayed at Brooklyn Methodist in various roles until 2021, moving into quality management leadership. After that, I became a clinical lead provider for City Block Health, focusing on community and population health management, seeing patients in their homes and via telehealth. I then served as Regional Director for Advanced Practice Nurses at Centralite Healthcare, a PACE program, where I managed 15 nurse practitioners across 13 day centers for geriatric patients in New York City. Due to family circumstances including a death and my mother-in-law going on hospice care, I transitioned to teaching. Now I'm a professor at Swedish Institute of Health, running their simulation lab and teaching students real-life medical scenarios using simulators. I also maintain my own telehealth practice seeing patients virtually, mostly women seeking weight management and women's health services for hormone imbalance. I'm currently pursuing my doctorate in nursing and was recently voted onto the Board of Trustees for Kingsborough Community College for a 3-year term.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Tiffany
01What do you attribute your success to?
I think perseverance is key - you're not always gonna do 100% all the time, but making sure that you stay in the game until you make it to the end has been something that's kept me on the path. I also attribute my success to having a supportive family. My parents have always been pushing me to continue and keep going, and of course my husband and my kids have helped a lot in keeping me motivated to continue doing what I do.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
The best career advice I received was to keep going and not to stop. This profession can be very overwhelming sometimes, dealing with human emotion and illness and things like that, so it can get rough. For folks who are very empathetic to their patients and feel very deeply about the care that they deliver, sometimes you take your patients' issues and situations home with you, so that can be kind of rough sometimes. You need that pep talk to keep going.
03What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
I think that loving yourself when you come into this industry and finding your voice is very important. You have to understand that you need to continue learning in order to grow in this field. It's essential to keep developing yourself professionally and personally as you navigate your nursing career.
04What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
The biggest challenge right now is burnout among nurses. Because of the volume of patients and the chronic conditions that we're seeing, burnout is a big issue. Nurses are constantly caring for others, but sometimes I feel that in this arena, we forget to take the moment to take care of ourselves. I've seen a lot of nurses fall ill or develop mental health issues because burnout is very real for them, and then they end up leaving the position or the bedside. That might have been part of my reason too for leaving the hospital after COVID - I just needed to take care of myself and dedicate more time to taking care of my kids who were really young at the moment. I think a big opportunity for nurses is training them that it's okay to take care of themselves and their own mental health. We've been kind of trained that you have to keep going regardless of what the situation is - we don't take breaks, we don't drink water, we don't take care of ourselves because we're taking care of everybody else. Knowing self-care and when to reach out for help, and training folks how to identify when they need help, is a big opportunity.
05What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
Prayer is most definitely the foundation for everything that I do. Family is obviously very important - making sure that my family's well and that I'm putting my family first. So definitely my faith, my religion, and my family are my core values right now.
Keep Exploring
More Influential Women · New York
Join Influential Women and start making an impact. Register now.