TN Center for Nursing Advancement, Ballad Health team up to highlight story of nurses

The story of nursing is a special one. As a demanding profession, requiring empathy, skill and enormous dedication to the needs of others, it has been under enormous strain during the past four years.

The Tennessee Center for Nursing Advancement and Ballad Health are partnering with East Tennessee State University and StoryCollab to create the Nurse Narratives Initiative to tell the stories of nursing, from nurses, and explain why nursing remains one of the most trusted professions.

In the face of unprecedented and historic labor shortages, the pressure on nursing has never been greater throughout America. The Tennessee Center for Nursing Advancement at East Tennessee State University and Ballad Health are hopeful that these stories, from nurses themselves, will motivate an entirely new generation of nurses, and help our current nurses by giving them a platform to acknowledge the burnout and stress they’ve experienced as America confronts the shortages. The Appalachian Highlands is leading this effort in the hope that other regions also will benefit from this work.

The Tennessee Center for Nursing Advancement at ETSU, created by the Tennessee Legislature and initiated through a $10 million commitment from Ballad Health, is searching for solutions and ways to support nurses across the Appalachian Highlands region and throughout Tennessee. Led by StoryCollab, part of the ETSU Research Corporation , this initiative will include more than 300 nurses and nurse educators who will participate in story sessions and workshops.

ETSU hosted a free screening of several of the first-person video stories, which touch on resilience and strength in the face of personal and professional challenges from local nurses, on campus this week  in the D.P. Culp Student Center to publicly launch this initiative.

“At ETSU, we are committed to upholding and strengthening our reputation as a premier health sciences institution not just in our region, but nationwide,” said Dr. Kimberly D. McCorkle, ETSU’s provost and senior vice president for Academic Affairs. “This initiative is reflective of that commitment and speaks to the high-quality work being done at the Tennessee Center for Nursing Advancement, which is dedicated to finding new, innovative ways to bolster the nursing pipeline in our region and state.”

The Tennessee Center for Nursing Advancement was created in October 2021 as a statewide resource dedicated to bringing academic nursing, clinical nursing and school systems together to expand opportunities for aspiring nurse candidates and augment the supply of nurses and nursing support in Tennessee.

The center is developing mechanisms for collecting and disseminating data related to the nursing profession in Tennessee. In partnership with communities throughout Tennessee, it will develop and propose a strategic statewide plan to address nursing workforce needs.

This wide-ranging project also will involve nurse educators from regional colleges and universities, including Emory & Henry College, King University, Milligan University, Mountain Empire Community College, Northeast State Community College, the University of Virginia’s College at Wise and Walters State Community College.

The initiative also includes an educational component that will provide nurses and nursing students at Ballad Health, ETSU and other regional nursing programs with the tools that emphasize the importance of empathy and communication along with critical clinical skills to lead to a successful nursing career.

Curriculum will be developed and integrated into existing courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels at the ETSU College of Nursing . It will feature interactive learning techniques, student-guided learning, peer-to-peer learning, personal reflection and other components.

“This is a unique initiative that our students, faculty and staff in the College of Nursing will certainly benefit from,” said Dr. Debbie Byrd, interim dean of the ETSU College of Nursing and dean of ETSU Bill Gatton College of Pharmacy. “Empathy is such a critical skill for health care providers, and integrating this work into our curriculum will help prepare our students to be successful, team- and patient-oriented health care providers upon graduation.”

The initiative will culminate in the creation of more than 120 first-person digital stories from nurses, nursing faculty, students and patients at ETSU’s nurse-led clinics. Some of the stories will be screened at ETSU’s Martha Street Culp Auditorium, located in the D.P. Culp Student Center, tomorrow. A film crew also will be part of this process, leading to the creation of a short documentary film titled the “Transformative Power of Empathy in Nursing.”

“The Nurse Narratives Initiative is a pioneering way to use storytelling by nurses themselves to help enhance one of America’s most important professions,” said Ballad Health chairman and CEO Alan Levine. “Listening to what our nurses have to say, ways they cope with the stress they have been under for the past several years, and understanding what motivates them is a rich resource for educating and inspiring future nurses. We hope our work will be used anywhere in America where it can help the profession.

“In the face of historic challenges to the profession, we’ve implemented many strategies to support the critical work our nurses do. We have learned that listening to our nurses has helped us reduce our turnover to historic lows and it’s helping us rebuild from the shortages we’ve experienced, which all our patients have felt. This is an ongoing journey, and we hope our work with this initiative will be helpful.”

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