While spending a summer taking care of her mother-in-law, who was ill with colon cancer, Lynne Allen, MN, ARNP, heard her calling loud and clear. “I thought, ‘Wow, I can do this,’ ” she says. “A lot of people can’t do this.”
Allen had completed a year of nursing school right after high school but never finished. So she decided to go back to school and earn a nursing degree. She graduated from the University of Washington’s Adult Acute Care Nurse Practitioner Program in 2001 and later landed a job at Columbia Basin Hematology and Oncology, a private practice in Kennewick, Wash.
At the time, a then-burgeoning hospitalist group based in Brentwood, Tenn., was looking to recruit nurses. Cogent Healthcare made Allen an offer. The idea of working in a hospital where doctors would be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, intrigued Allen. “I was a house supervisor in grad school and always remember thinking, ‘If only I had a physician in here, I could take care of this problem in two minutes,’ ” she says.
Allen accepted the offer and went to work in Cogent’s nonphysician clinical development program. Last year, she returned to Columbia Basin, where she makes hospitalist rounds four times a week at Kadlec Regional Medical Center in Richland, Wash. Allen, the newest member of Team Hospitalist, recently spoke with The Hospitalist about the unique perspective nurse practitioners (NPs) offer HM.
Question: What do you like about working with hospitalists?
Answer: I like the teamwork involved. I really like going in the morning and seeing that the nurses cared for the patients all night and know what is going on. I like knowing that they can feel comfortable calling me about what they need and making a difference. In terms of hospital medicine, just because [a patient] stays a long time doesn’t mean they are getting the quality of care they need. There are other issues involved with that, especially in cancer patients. They are afraid to go home, afraid of dying. If you have a patient with cancer or COPD [chronic obstructive pulmonary disease] and they are probably not going to live as long as they would normally, you begin to talk to them about their goals for themselves, in terms of quality of life.
Q: How do you initiate that conversation?
A: Medicare has made it very easy, because every patient that comes in should be asked if they have a living will, so you bring that subject up. Most people, when they are dying, they know it. The rest of the family is surprised, but the patient knows it. Sometimes you just bring it up point-blank.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF LYNNE ALLEN
PHOTOS COURTESY OF LYNNE ALLEN
Q: Why does HM present an opportunity for NPs?
A: I think workforce is one of the issues. I think there are a lot of nurses out there who have worked in a hospital and love that acute-care environment. It is very different than working in a clinic. I do both right now, and there is such a difference in what you need to know about your patients and how you treat them.