Vocera Celebrates Nurses
Together with our 51 nurses, we celebrate you. We’re sharing some of the stories from our nursing team to inspire and lift up the voice of nurses everywhere.
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My Grandmother, the Nurse Advocate
Senior Clinical Informaticist at Vocera, Supporting Clients Throughout the United States and Canada

When I was growing up, I wanted to be a scientist because I just knew that I was going to find a cure for cancer. But then my grandma, Catherine Crowther, influenced me to become a nurse.
My family lived in Charlotte, North Carolina. I was an only child, and I spent every summer with my grandmother in Brooklyn, New York. She would take me to work with her.
My grandmother was a nurse advocate. She advocated for the rights of people with disabilities and their access to healthcare in the state of New York. While every nurse is a patient advocate, nursing advocacy is a profession in which the nurse is dedicated to working on behalf of patients to maintain quality of care and protect patients’ rights. My grandmother drove meaningful legislative change through her activism.
Consider an MRI machine in a hospital. Can someone with a disability access that machine? My grandmother made sure that type of question was always asked and worked to make sure an accessible machine would be made available. As another example, women with disabilities have gone undiagnosed with breast cancer because they couldn’t access a mammography machine. My grandmother worked to be sure they could.
When I was 18 and planning to go to college, I found myself wavering from my goal of becoming a research scientist and considering nursing as a career. I talked about it with my grandmother. She said, “You don’t have to put the research aside. There are nursing researchers.”
I told myself that whether I was at the bedside or not, I wanted to be an advocate for the patient.
I decided I would like nursing better. I liked the idea of engaging with people, advocating for them, and seeing them get better. I told myself that whether I was at the bedside or not, I wanted to be an advocate for the patient.
In my role today with Vocera, I engage frequently with hospital leaders, managers, providers, and nurses about how to make their communication more efficient and more effective. When we’re designing and building communication systems, I always make it a point to talk to them about what the patient experiences and how to make the patient’s engagement and the coordination of care even better with Vocera. I make sure we’re keeping the patient at the center.
An example that stands out for me happened while I was working with a hospital in Brooklyn.
I learned that a lot of the hospital’s patients were not coming back for their follow-up physician visit after discharge. An appointment would be scheduled for them, but they wouldn’t show up.
The hospital ran a patient survey and learned that patients felt that the appointments were being scheduled without including them in the conversation. No one was engaging with them to ask something as simple as, “What day and time work for you?” or, “Do you have transportation?”
We helped the hospital to change the patient follow up visit scheduling workflow. In the new workflow, a nurse wearing the Vocera Badge contacts central scheduling directly from a patient’s bedside. The nurse just presses a button on the Badge and says, “Call Central Scheduling.” The nurse can then include the patient in scheduling the appointment, and in coordinating transportation if needed.
The hospital’s analyst told me that patient attendance at physician follow-up visits increased by 40% after implementing this workflow.
Usually when we think of Vocera we think about throughput or emergent workflows like Code Blue or Code STEMI. We forget about the simple things that are meaningful for patients, like making sure they have a visit scheduled that works for them so they can come back and see their doctor.
This is an example of how watching my grandmother advocate for people with disabilities to make sure they had access to health care impacted me. I keep her lessons at the forefront of my mind as I advocate for patients in the way I think about communication.
Being There When Somebody Exits the World
Senior Clinical Executive at Vocera, Supporting Clients in the United States Great Lakes Region

About fifteen years ago, I was working night shifts in the medical ICU.
A woman in her forties had come in with newly diagnosed breast cancer, which she’d probably had for at least six months. It had metastasized throughout her body.
I took care of her often and shared a connection with her around both of us having two sons and a husband.
She deteriorated gradually, eventually on full life support. One evening, I arrived for my 7:00 p.m. shift. The nurse handing off to me told me the patient had been deteriorating and a decision had been made to prepare her to pass away comfortably and without resuscitation that night.
The doctor said to me, “Manage it however you want to. You can shut everything off at once. You can just shut off the drips. You can shut off the ventilator. However you want to do it.”
I pulled the patient’s husband aside and sat down with him. I asked, “What is going to be least traumatic for your kids and you?”
He decided not to take her off the ventilator because he didn’t want to see her struggling to breathe.
He agreed it would be best to just shut off the drips one by one, allowing her blood pressure and heart rate to gradually slow until her heart just stopped. I told him, “I don’t know how long that’s going to take. It could be minutes. It could be hours.”
The greatest thing I could do was to get those kids to be able to say goodbye to their mom.
He said, “Okay.”
Hearing is the last sense to go, and I believe that patients can hear everything up until the end. I said, “We need to say goodbye. I’ll come in there and help you.”
He said, “Okay.”
We went out and talked to the boys, who were about 14 and 16. I said to them, “We’re going to go into your mom’s room. I believe she can hear you. I don’t think she’s in any pain since we’re making sure she has pain medicine. We need to go in and give you an opportunity to say goodbye. All you have to say is, ‘I love you, mom.’ That’s enough.”
They nodded. They were in shock.
We walked into the room, and the husband went to hold his wife’s left hand. The boys were at the end of the bed. She didn’t look like their mom. She was all swollen and had tubes everywhere. They had seen her, but now they just were terrified. They didn’t want to hold her hand.
I said, “Okay. You don’t have to. I’ll hold her right hand.” Then I held one boy’s hand. He held his brother’s hand, and the brother held the dad’s hand.
I said, “Okay. We’re all in a circle. You’re connected to your mom.”
The dad went first. He said, “Honey, I love you. I’m going to take care of these boys. I’m going to raise them right.”
The boys stood there, speechless. I just started to talk for them. I said, “Your two sons are here. They love you very much. They’re going to take care of each other. They’re going to make you proud.” As I spoke, they moved closer to where I was standing. I slowly backed away and brought the closest son’s hand to his mom’s. Then the other son came in and they held it together.
I slipped out of the room. That is what we’re supposed to do. It is not our show. It is our job as nurses to facilitate things that people can’t do for themselves, to be that patient advocate. Our place is in the background because the family is the greatest connection. We may know about the drips and the critical care, but it really comes down to personal connection.
To me, the greatest blessing is to be there when somebody exits the world, and the greatest thing I could do was to get those kids to be able to say goodbye to their mom.
I was an ICU nurse for 20 years and then moved into leadership. In my last four years of working in hospitals, I was a chief nursing officer in the Cleveland area. One of the reasons I decided to leave the hospital because I felt some degree of burnout. I wanted just to refresh myself, but still be a voice for nursing in some way. I was a Vocera customer for nine years before I joined this company.
We always say in nursing, “What’s your “why”?” For me, being at Vocera, my why is to make sure that we create an opportunity for nurses to be able to create those important experiences with patients and families.
Nurses: Medical Detectives, Caregivers, Counsellors, and All That Is Good in Healthcare
Clinical Informaticist at Vocera, Supporting Clients in the United Kingdom

Throughout my 20-year career as a pediatric and neonatal nurse practitioner, I was involved in the care of many patients and their families. Of the many experiences that have shaped the way I work and impacted how I have understood the importance of my role as a nurse, one stands out.
About ten years ago, I was performing a role that allowed me to spend a portion of my time working as part of a Children’s Community Nursing team in the South West Wales region of the United Kingdom, which is where I worked for the large part of my career.
I would regularly visit children and their families in their own homes and provide care ranging from invasive therapies and procedures to delivery of medical supplies to patients at home.
Our team shared an office with a group of school health nurses, and we’d often do favors for each other. The lead for the school health nursing team asked me one day if I would deliver some incontinence pads – adolescent nappies – to a 12-year-old child who had just started high school and was suffering from nighttime enuresis.
I asked for background as to why the child was incontinent. I was told he had a history of anxiety and that a large part of this ongoing episode, which had been happening for the past few months, was due to his starting in a new school. I was told that the incontinence would probably pass once the initial anxiety of starting school wore off.
On arrival at the family’s house, I met the boy’s mother and delivered the nappies. She invited me in, and I met the young man. On talking with her and her son I learned that he was highly embarrassed about wearing nappies overnight and was also displaying symptoms such as increased thirst and weight loss. I noticed that his breath had an unusual sweet smell to it. I suspected he might have pediatric diabetes.
Nurses epitomize everything that is good in healthcare.
I asked the boy’s mum if she’d mind if I tested her son’s blood sugar. She consented and I went to the car and got my blood sugar monitor. I took a small sample, and as I expected, his blood sugar level was well above the normal range.
I got in touch with the Children’s Community Medical Consultant for the area and asked for the boy to be referred for further assessment.
Several weeks later the boy’s mother contacted me. She told me that her son had recently been assessed by the local pediatric medical team in an outpatient clinic and as a result had been diagnosed with pediatric diabetes. She appeared unusually happy with the diagnosis, and as she described how much it had changed her son’s life, I understood why.
The treatment for his diabetes included nighttime medication which prevented the bedwetting. He didn’t have to wear nappies at bedtime anymore. This increased his confidence and allowed for an easier adjustment into high school. Understanding that the bedwetting had been a symptom of the illness, not a result of anxiety, reduced his sense of embarrassment.
Other positive outcomes resulted for the boy and his family. Because he was now receiving the correct treatment for his underlying condition, his long-term health prospects increased. His parents were enjoying a better quality of life because they were relieved of constant worry about their son’s emotional and physical situation.
This experience stands out to me as one of my most valuable in terms of understanding how important we as nurses and caregivers are. We can make a difference not only in the lives of our patients, but also in the lives of the family and friends that they touch.
Nurses epitomize everything that is good in healthcare. We are medical detectives, caregivers, counselors, and usually the central link between all the other professions allied to medicine. I am immensely proud of everything I have achieved as a nurse and am incredibly proud to have chosen this as a lifelong profession.

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Rhonda Collins, RN, DNP, FAAN, Chief Nursing Officer at Vocera and co-founder of The American Nurse Project