SPEAKERS

David Williams, Dr. Carolyn Harmon

 

David Williams

Welcome to Conversatio the Belmont Abbey College podcast. This podcast focuses on the way of formation and transformation so that each of us reflects God’s image in an ever more palpable and transparent way. I’m David Williams, vice provost for academic affairs at Belmont Abbey And today, I’m joined by Dr. Carolyn Harmon, the dean of nursing here at the Abbey.

 

David Williams

Together we’ll explore the benefits of this based nursing program. But before we jump in.

Talk about why you decided to become a nurse and Dr.Herman why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself.

 

Dr. Carolyn Harmon

My grandfather actually passed away from what, in the healthcare industry we call a sentinel event. But that is where there is a mistake in or error in medicine. And based off of that, the beacon of my career has been patient safety. And throughout my career, I have achieved many things. But I think that any life that I was able to save or population to improve the outcomes, that that would actually be the number one thing that I consider my greatest accomplishment, I guess you would say.

 

Dr. Carolyn Harmon

And so basically, from there, I have decided to go back to school numerous times. I started off with an associate degree, which is a two year nursing degree return for my R&R boys in return for my M.S. in. And then I’m currently working on my second doctorate and so it has been quite a road and quite a challenge.

 

Dr. Carolyn Harmon

I actually started off in nursing at approximately 17 years old when I started my associate degree, graduated when I was 19 and received my nursing license when I was 20. So it has been a lifelong journey for me and there has been a lot of lifelong learning within that journey. So it’s been wonderful and I’m super happy to be here at Belmont Abbey to start the nursing program.

 

David Williams

And as soon as some of the audience will know this is a new exploration for us at the Abbey, and it’s taking off from her from some unique opportunities that we’ll talk about. And also it makes a great fit in terms of our Catholic and Benedictine identity. So what do you think we have here? As we prepare to get our first class of nursing students through and graduate them in 2024?

 

David Williams

What do you think being here at this Catholic Benedictine place makes possible or lets us do things in a new or different way?

 

Dr. Carolyn Harmon

Well, actually, I believe that that stems from your St Benedict’s mandate that caring for the sick master rank above and before all else So that is basically the position of nursing and that’s the position of nursing here within Belmont Abbey. We utilize a lot of the Benedictine hallmarks in nursing, such as humility to know our personal strengths as well as our weaknesses, such as a maternity nurse may not know how to do something that a cardiac nurse does.

 

Dr. Carolyn Harmon

But actually that’s one of the great benefits of becoming a nurse. If you get tired of one specialty or area, there’s always another one with the door wide open, hoping and waiting for you to transition to that. So you have a lot of opportunities when you go into nursing. And speaking of opportunities, I think that another opportunity that we have here at Belmont Abbey is our partnership with CareMont.

 

Dr. Carolyn Harmon

That particular partnership is above and beyond where we can give our students the opportunity to go to a clinical site that is actually here on campus. And that’s a very, very unusual relationship in the fact that those institutions are one and the same. If they have a medical center and an academic university or college within the same site, on a campus.

 

Dr. Carolyn Harmon

And I just think that that’s a huge benefit that we offer that is very unique, especially within the state of North Carolina.

 

And in our size to expand more for. For first time listeners, that partnership, Dr. Harman was speaking out is something really uniquely Benedictine. It’s a relationship where Belmont Abbey Monastery rents some campus land to care of Mount Health, a local health care system, which is building a satellite hospital on that land, a hospital that will provide clinical sites for our nursing students that makes it possible for us to do things in a really new way.

 

David Williams

And part of that, Benedictine care for the sick. One of those Benedictine hallmarks is also stewardship. The monastery leases their land rather than selling it. So they can be sure that whatever they are leasing for benefits the local community and is exercised as a stewardship. And I think that’s something really unique as well as the opportunity itself normally to have that kind of benefit.

 

David Williams

It’s a much larger university here. You can have the intimacy of a small institution and personal attention as well as that ability to access resources that few small institutions have. Why? Why do you think we’ve already noticed significant interest among students in others? Why do you think that there’s such interest in nursing in general or particularly to be pursuing it here?

 

Dr. Carolyn Harmon

Well, the interest in nursing revolves around the fact that we have been in a shortage for approximately a century. I would say since probably the 1920s is when we first noticed the shortage. We attempted to in nursing. When I say we refer to nursing as a profession and we attempted to address it in the 1960s and 1970s by introducing the entry into practice with associate degrees.

 

Dr. Carolyn Harmon

Then later we realized that actually at the bachelor level through research and evidence that we have that for multiple decades large national studies we have realized that bachelor’s degree and higher nurses actually perform and have better outcomes than you’re more technical nurse, which is an associate or diploma graduate. The shortage has been really devastating since COVID. Since COVID 19, it has actually transitioned from just what I would say is our normal routine shortage that we’ve been experiencing for many, many years.

 

Dr. Carolyn Harmon

And we have now turned into what I consider a crisis, and we just do not have enough people at the bedside.

 

David Williams

And that’s with nursing being a very popular choice for undergrads.

 

Dr. Carolyn Harmon

Exactly.

 

David Williams

Because I think and that’s true at the community college level. It’s true here. It’s true other places.

 

Dr. Carolyn Harmon

Yes. And that has to do within each state because nursing is a regulated profession. So each state has what’s called the state board of nursing, and that actually regulates nursing and the nursing practice and the rationale behind that is to protect our public. And that kind of goes back to, you know, the patient safety. And while I became a nurse so the Board of nursing has its reasons for regulating the practice, and that is to prevent harm to an injury to patients.

 

Dr. Carolyn Harmon

It also they where they regulate not only just our practice in your acute facilities or your community practice as a nurse, whichever, they also regulate academics because a nursing program actually has unlicensed nurses or I mean, excuse me, unlicensed students that will actually touch a patient. And so therefore, they have to protect that public. And with that being said, they have introduced what’s called ratios and that your faculty to student ratio and do to those ratios.

 

Dr. Carolyn Harmon

They also regulate the number of seats or the number of students that you can have within a nursing program.

 

David Williams

At one time you explained it to me because as determined in part by how many students can fit around a hospital bed. Right. Right. And it’s been an Eye-Opener for those of us at the college because we’re accustomed to being accredited and approved by our institutional accreditor. But because you’re in a clinical degree and all those consequences for patient care and quality of care, we need approval from our institutional accreditor we need approval from the State Board of Nursing.

 

David Williams

And then there are specialized nursing program. Accreditors. Right. So you’re working through three overlapping accreditations. You start a new program.

 

Dr. Carolyn Harmon

So accreditation and regulatory is very well known within health care because you have lots of that in the hospitals. And when I transitioned from acute care practice and working in the hospital to academics, and I was not surprised and it’s easy for me to understand our regulatory practices, but I do want to like to remind you that this makes me think about our good news that we have to tell people.

 

Dr. Carolyn Harmon

And that is as of January 13th, we were approved by the North Carolina Board of Nursing, and that is for us to start nursing here at Belmont Abbey. And that is a very exciting to me. It was a lot of hard work and sweat and maybe even some tears here there sometimes. But that basically it was actually it was good.

 

Dr. Carolyn Harmon

It actually. What was rewarding about that experience was the mere fact that, yes, we are it was a validation of the fact that we do have quality nursing here at Belmont Abbey with our plans and through our partnership with Care, Mont and all of the other things and all the other great things that we are doing here at Belmont Abbey.

 

David Williams

It really was a very nice moment. And I kept this and I’ve never seen an accreditation report in that many hundreds of pages as the one we had to do for the State Board of Nursing What? Why don’t you say something? Is there something to be said? Do you think about what we’re already seeing in the students who are coming to us with pre nursing as you’re starting to get to know them?

 

Dr. Carolyn Harmon

So I’ve actually been surprised at the knowledge base of our pre nursing students and their enthusiasm. They’re so excited to have nursing here. They’re excited to see the construction of our medical center that is going to be on campus. But the other day, we were actually in our lab with some of the pre nursing students, and I was so shocked.

 

Dr. Carolyn Harmon

We were looking at some of the mannequins and some of the tools that we use in a nursing lab that actually you will develop your nursing skills and do your practice. And we were just kind of playing and not be in like a serious setting for, you know, true academics. We were just talking to the students trying to excite them about what’s going on.

 

Dr. Carolyn Harmon

And I was asking questions that were very pointed questions that I would consider are not novice nursing questions. And it was actually the identification of a person having a stroke. And I was extremely impressed with the answers. Some of these students have a background. We have students that are EMT and paramedics. Their parents are nurse practitioners.

 

Dr. Carolyn Harmon

So we do have a core group of students that coming into our nursing program that have already multiple health care experiences in addition to that, we have a significant number of male students in historically, nursing has been a female dominated profession, and I’m very excited to see we have more males interested in becoming nurses because that is something for I know at least the last decade that in the nursing discipline we have tried to encourage and and excite men to come into nursing and have males in our profession because they seem to do very well and be successful within the profession.

 

Dr. Carolyn Harmon

So we want to have it to be more diverse and equal with that. And I was excited to see that we do have larger numbers than most nursing programs. So I would like to welcome any male or female that’s interested in nursing. And so it was exciting to see all of this.

 

David Williams

And it’s that first wave of pre nursing that will be starting the junior level nursing courses, labs, clinicals, right. With the facility we’re just finishing constructing.

 

Dr. Carolyn Harmon

Right. So they will start I’ll speaking at the lab. The lab is super exciting. That is where you actually when you go to nursing school, you get to play with the mannequins and there’s multiple skills that you learn from injections. That’s the exciting stuff. For the students. They love learning that. And even as a seasoned nurse, I still like to do those kind of things myself and it’s fun because you get to practice on mannequins where they’re not going to hurt or harm and you can make your mistakes in the lab and then so we develop those skills there, and then we take you into that clinical environment where you can start working on the actual real human being.

 

David Williams

I’ve been amazed at the level of technology in modern nursing education, especially because one of our senior faculty is is a military veteran, and he was in ages ago in his day, they taught military nurses how to do that by lining up recruits in a line and just having people practice on them when it’s nice to be passed that right with modern education.

 

Dr. Carolyn Harmon

Well, yes, it’s great because we have we now have like artificial intelligence that we use. We have a mannequin that I’m glad that you brought that up because we have a mannequin that he can speak in three different languages and answer hundreds of thousands of questions. He’s a really interesting mannequin and tool that the students can use to learn so we can facilitate cardiac rhythms.

 

Dr. Carolyn Harmon

We have one mannequin that gives birth, and we in that mannequin, you can even do fetal heart monitoring. So we do have some really fun, exciting technical tools that are men and mimic the reality of a hospital setting. And if you care.

 

David Williams

And what and our first nurses will graduate in the spring of 24 right class of 2024. And with the shortage they’ll be going right out into care environments as soon as they pass the licensure exam.

 

Dr. Carolyn Harmon

Exactly.

 

David Williams

Which most students take that summer. What do you think we can hope for the nurses for our nurses as they come out of our program into that oh work and the continuing crisis in just nursing staff.

 

Dr. Carolyn Harmon

So the one thing that sets nurses apart from here at Belmont Abbey, from all of the other nursing programs within the entire United States is the fact that we have a focus on ethics and what I call moral courage. And so let me take a moment to explain you know, nursing is a very just like the Benedictine hallmarks, very disciplined.

 

Dr. Carolyn Harmon

You have to be very disciplined so that you can prioritize your care because that prioritization can be somebody’s life. So you have to be it’s a very serious discipline and you have to be able to do those things And so definitely we will and our programs focus in on those who own those skills and focus in on those type of skills.

 

Dr. Carolyn Harmon

But here at Belmont Abbey, we are also in our core curriculum. We have a heavy emphasis on ethics, and we even have recruited a very well renowned, educated bioethicist that teaches a Catholic bioethics course and nursing. We have an ethics. We even have we have our own ethics because of the type of work we do from day in today, out from like what I talked about, the prioritization and just dealing with, you know, deaths and making sure our practice is to the best skills that we have and all of those things that we do every day from where we’re holding someone’s hand to work, caring for the family, all of those wonderful things that we do

 

Dr. Carolyn Harmon

every day. And so here at Belmont Abbey and it and I know my voice is breaking up because it’s just so moving for me to talk about it. We not only teach the American Nurses Association Code of Ethics, just like every other institution, we go a step further. So what I hope in is not just to have a seat at the table with the Ethics Committee, but what I would love to see are those nurses from our program graduating to lead those committees within the health care systems.

 

Dr. Carolyn Harmon

And there’s even ethical nursing in national organizations. I would love to see one of our graduates to be a president of that national nursing you know, organization. It’s just would be so it would just bless my heart and soul to see those things, because I would feel like my work was well worth it. All of the hard work that we’ve done to implement nursing here at Belmont Abbey, which is really validate the work that I’ve done.

 

Dr. Carolyn Harmon

In addition to that, when I talk about moral courage and I talk about the nursing shortage and crisis, part of our our shortage is we are older profession where a lot of nurses are retiring and the retiring. Now, we also had some loss due to COVID, also nurses burnout and burnout is very common. And we’ve done a lot of research around burnout to try to minimize and mitigate it in future generations.

 

Dr. Carolyn Harmon

And through that, we affirm what is called moral courage. And moral courage is where you can develop skills and tools, where you do things like self-care, where you take care of yourself and try to minimize the burnout. The worst situation that you can have is where you know, nurses, we are known to work and work and work, and we always put our needs last.

 

Dr. Carolyn Harmon

Our patients needs our first. But we have realized that you can only do so many shifts in a row because the more shifts you do in a row, the more likelihood you are to have an error. And that’s due to fatigue. And that once you have an IRA error, you have great concern because in self-reflection, it’s not the practice that you want to have.

 

Dr. Carolyn Harmon

It’s not the path that way. It’s not why we got into nursing. It’s not why we became a nurse. So a lot of times you do a lot of reflection, and through that reflection you go into what’s called a phase of moral distress. And the worst case, more moral distress that we have encountered in nursing is where nurses will commit suicide.

 

David Williams

I saw some cases of that in the papers there during the height of COVID in places. And I think a lot of us who aren’t involved in clinical professions, right? We can miss that because our mistakes don’t do what your mistake.

 

Dr. Carolyn Harmon

Right. Our mistakes are someone’s life. And in what we hope to do here is to give those our students the tools as to be able to cope and and have that ability to know yourself and to know what you can do and to know if, if two 12 hour shifts in a row is all I can do. So the good thing about nursing we now do nowadays we have is a lot of self scheduling.

 

Dr. Carolyn Harmon

And so then we try to encourage students to then when you’re in practice, do yourself scheduling to where you have a day off at the after two days, don’t try to cram three and four 12 hour shifts in a row. There’s a lot of of information that says that after two that you really should have a break.

 

David Williams

I think that makes sense. And it’s one place where, I mean, monastic tradition is nothing but how to manage your lifelong commitments, whether it’s persevering faithfully in the monastery, as it says in the rule or we all have our life commitments, whatever our profession. But I think it also helps in the in the caring professions to sort of have that balance as you go through.

 

David Williams

And hopefully it’s with our our students completing most of that formation prior to their real nursing courses. They’ll have that formation in their first two years and then as juniors and seniors. So I’ll be doing nursing courses hopefully that will help them process then because I think it seems to me looking at it from the outside, junior and senior nursing students are awfully busy they are.

 

David Williams

And being able to manage that in some ways is probably a little bit of a helpful test for that. Can they manage the more serious things right when they’re providing care?

 

Dr. Carolyn Harmon

Exactly. They are very busy. And the good part about having it where you do two years at the core here at Belmont Abbey and you have all of your sciences and your math and and the bioethics that I spoke about is you build that foundation and then once you get into those upper level years, your junior senior years, then you can from that foundation that you build from, you know, from those first two years, you can then develop all of those nursing skills and advance.

 

Dr. Carolyn Harmon

So the goal is there is a theorist in nursing. Her name has been our and she even has a theory called novice to expert we may not have because there you’re a new graduate as a nurse. So you’re probably not going to be at the expert level because expert level, you really don’t start reaching until many years into your specialty.

 

Dr. Carolyn Harmon

But at least they’re not novice. They may feel like a novice just because you’re you’re still new. You’re new to the profession. But the good part about it is, is they have already surpassed that through those foundational courses. And then we will even do what’s called a transition to practice. Now, this is what common. There are too many nursing programs, but we have partnership.

 

Dr. Carolyn Harmon

We’ve taken the transition to practice plan, even like one step further and have partnered with Carmel aren’t and they have. So we have a clinical learning coordinator here at Belmont Abbey and then they have a person at Claremont there in the clinical world that is part of that transition to practice because they’re easing the person from the academic world to the hospital, acute care, or even if you want to go into other like community or home health or whatever, it’s nice to have that what we call a transition to practice, just like a lot of what you see in a lot of other clinical professions where you it takes about six months to a year to

 

Dr. Carolyn Harmon

really build that foundation within your profession.

 

David Williams

I can I can believe it. My own mother was a nurse and she was in a northeastern city emergency room at 22 years old.

 

Dr. Carolyn Harmon

Oh yeah, 23.

 

David Williams

I think it was her first position out of diploma nursing school.

 

Dr. Carolyn Harmon

So when she was okay so she was 22 and she was in a large city, you said. So she saw a lot of high level trauma as oh my.

 

David Williams

Yes. No member of my family has been alive and I’m serious, has been allowed to drive a motorcycle on the road since the 1960s I haven’t.

 

Dr. Carolyn Harmon

I don’t feel the same. I actually did emergency nursing myself and will not get on a motorcycle and I used to when I was a kid growing up, I used to get on horses and motorcycles and all of those even the four wheelers and all of that kind of equipment and now you will never see me do that.

 

David Williams

We are, we are, we all have these experiences. I think I think we’ve sort of followed our nursing suit students through the journey, right as it were. And I think we’ve seen a lot of the ways we’re trying to give them that that foundation with advantages, right? As the gospel says, you want to build your house on rock, not on sand.

 

David Williams

And even though they won’t get those upper stories of expert until they’re out, although a different podcast would be to talk about our steps into graduate education in nursing. Right. But that’s a different episode. Right, exactly. And I hope I hope our audiences enjoyed looking at what we think is a really unique contribution to nursing education in North Carolina and even even in the region as a sort of Catholic presence.

 

David Williams

Information in that I’m thrilled to talk with you today and I can’t wait to see the rest of this journey with nursing unfold. And I should book the return set where we can do a podcast on graduate education down the road. But in the meantime, thanks to our audience for joining us. And if you enjoy Conversatio, please subscribe and tell your friends conversation is available through Spotify, Google Podcasts until next time.

 

David Williams

God bless.