I Am a Telehealth Nurse | Cincinnati Children's

http://www.cincinnatichildrens.org

I am a nurse. I'm a nurse. I am a nurse. A creative problem solver. A strong leader. An advocate. A critical thinker. A people person. Dependable. A friend. Helper. An educator. Loving. Community focused. A voice for my patient. Compassionate. I'm a nurse.

My name is Liz Hutzel-Dunham, and I am a nurse in the Pediatric Primary Care Center. We see about 800 kids a week, 200 kids a day. Primarily, I do triage nursing and that's through telemedicine. Kids call in with illnesses, like, they have a cough or congestion, there's something wrong with their eye or they have some kind of rash or something like that.

So we look for things that we can see, that can enhance the nursing triage assessment and experience. It's a huge convenience for them so they don't need to leave their homes. I can see them on video and say, "Mom, I really think that this is just a cold," and support her and the things that she's done for the child and give her some suggestions for things that she can do and then tell her when to call me back or to come in the clinic or to go into the emergency room. So then they're not taking those three buses to get to us. She's not packing up all of her kids. She's not leaving work and risking her job. She's not pulling her children out of school. We literally grass rooted this program. We started out small. I was only telehealth nurse for a couple months and I work part time, so where there's just little dabbling here and there and a lot of monitoring and tweaking and we worked on the verbiage for the patients and with technology and things like that, setting it up, and then we've expanded, so I trained another nurse and now we have all of the nurses trained in the telehealth department.

We're so supportive of growth and development and, just like this, I am "just a clinic nurse" and I've made this program all on my own. We're traveling all over and spreading it across the institution and we're spreading it, really, internationally.

This has turned into a lot bigger than I imagined it was going to be. We do have the opportunity in the next, maybe, five to ten years for me to quit working, but I don't think I will quit working here at Children's. I love being a nurse and I love the population that we work with. I like making a difference. I really do. I like when people come back. I like when I see people out on the street that are like, "That's my nurse. There she is. She did this for me." Like, that just, I have thousands upon thousands of those experiences now and that's why I would come back.

My name is Liz and I am a nurse.