A career nurse with almost 40 years of experience Carmen McDonald, Ph.D., MHA, MSN, lectures within the nursing programs at Rowan University in Glassboro, NJ.
Passionate about leading and training nurses, Dr. McDonald recently created a nurse executive specialization within a master's degree at Rowan to help train tomorrow's educators and leaders. Dr. McDonald has served as a nurse for almost 40 years and has been an adjunct at Rowan University for 10 years and is also a nationally certified in advanced holistic nurse and is a nurse executive.
Beth Dombkowski:
Hello. My name is Beth Dombkowski and I'm coming to you from the Office of Admissions at Rowan university in Glassboro, New Jersey. Welcome to Rowan Confidential. I am joined today by Carmen McDonald. Welcome.
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
Thank you.
Beth Dombkowski:
So happy to have you on. Carmen has been a nurse for over 38 years and has worked in a variety of different roles in healthcare leadership. She has a Bachelor's in Health Education from Rowan University, an MSN and an MHA from University of Phoenix and a PhD in Healthcare Administration from Walden University. In addition, Carmen is nationally certified as an advanced holistic nurse and nurse executive. Thank you so much for joining us today. You've been an adjunct professor here since 2009, right?
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
Yeah, going into my 10th year.
Beth Dombkowski:
Oh my goodness.
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
Thank you.
Beth Dombkowski:
You came full-time, August.
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
I did, about a year ago. I've been here full-time a year ago. I'm happy to be at Rowan and thank you for having me today.
Beth Dombkowski:
Absolutely. So Carmen, what wakes you up in the morning? What's your inspiration or passion?
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
My inspiration is having a purpose. I think that's why we all need to get up in the morning. You have to have a purpose that drives you. I think that being a leader for many years in healthcare and really seeing an evolution if you will, of the whole environment of healthcare over the last 38 and half years I'm going into right now, and just really feeling like I have a purpose to really mold the leaders in nursing of the current environment and of tomorrow, I am passionate about that. I'm passionate about my profession and I want to see it flourish. I want to see nurses reach their maximum potential. I feel that, yeah, that's my purpose and I still have a lot to share in my professional career. And being in academia now full-time, it's just everything's happened perfectly the way it needed to happen.
Beth Dombkowski:
So what is your role here at Rowan? Does Rowan have a nursing program?
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
Uh huh (affirmative). Thank you. Rowan has a, you actually have to be already a registered nurse. So in the true essence of being a nursing school, we don't have an undergraduate program for the RN to become an RN. However, our program has been founded on the nurse who is already licensed, who has to have additional degrees and the current environment demands it. The environment in our area, and even nationally, is really making the bachelor of science and nursing degree an entry level of education. Further, the master's now is really becoming more needed. And in order-
Beth Dombkowski:
An industry standard.
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
For sure, yeah, not only to advanced nursing as an evidence based that it is, but also to remain interprofessional with our colleagues that, for example, physical therapists, pharmacists now, their entry-level is a doctorate. So I have no reason to believe that we are not headed in that direction as well. So the advanced degrees is what our program is. So we have an RN to BSN program. Further, we have a master's program that has grown immensely over the last five years that is you can get a master's as a nurse practitioner for adult gero or adult gerontology I should say, or family nurse practitioner. We now have a nurse educator track for those that don't want to be nurse practitioners but in fact want to be nurse educators in either the hospital setting the health care setting or in college.
Beth Dombkowski:
Oh, interesting.
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
What I was hired for and what I'm really very passionate about, I just got done finishing up tying the last ends of the nurse executive specialization.
Beth Dombkowski:
Oh, what is that?
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
That will be exactly as the name suggests, that the master's will be a specialization in leading, nurse leadership, the nurse executive, everything that the nurse executive needs to lead teams in healthcare. That was my background. I was a leader for many years. I've worked in the industry as a leader for the last probably two decades. So that was why I was hired really to create this curriculum. So I'm happy to say I've submitting that now. We hope to have that launched in 2020.
Beth Dombkowski:
Oh wonderful. So are there other programs like that around or-
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
There are other nurse leadership programs for sure in other colleges. So in order for Rowan to remain cutting edge and competitive, we want it to be more than the nurse practitioner school for sure. And don't get me wrong, we have over 300 students currently enrolled to be nurse practitioners, but in truth, not all nurses want to be an NP and some want to be educators and leaders. So now we have it all.
Beth Dombkowski:
That's so interesting. One of the recurring themes that I'm finding in this podcast is that students who are graduating high school, they know the names of say a few professions that are out there. So they know nurse, but they don't know all of the other things that you could do as a nurse. So what's something that you wish people knew about this field that maybe people don't know?
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
I wish people knew that with the multitude of specialties available, you literally can do anything as a nurse today. For example, if you decide you graduate and you go into becoming a med surge nurse, medical surgical nurse, and you work on a unit at a hospital. And after a couple years or maybe even sooner you say, "You know what? I really think I want to maybe be a critical care nurse or maybe I want to be a flight nurse or maybe I want to be a nurse researcher or a nurse scientist or an educator," or so on.
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
The list goes on and on. That's the beauty of this profession. You can be a dad or mom. You can be someone who maybe even has a consulting job, has side career. A lot of nurses today are working and this has been for a while. Staff nurses for example are working 12 hour shifts in hospital settings right now. When I was a leader, I could not get any of my nurses to ever even start the conversation about going back to eight hours, five days a week because again, they were dads, moms or just wanted those four days off a week. So while the 12 hour shift is, it takes a little getting used to-
Beth Dombkowski:
It sounds daunting.
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
It's arduous at times because it's a lot of work. The good news is you have four days off a week to recover.
Beth Dombkowski:
Oh, that's wonderful.
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
So nurses, again, this has been the industry standard and nurses really love their 12 hour shifts. Now that said, if you go into the other specializations, the ones I mentioned, nurse leaders for example don't typically work that kind of a schedule.
Beth Dombkowski:
Sure.
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
There's also modifications like four tens. Nurses can do four tens because nurses are needed everywhere. I think that's the takeaway. Nurses are needed in industries. For example, there's nurses that work in manufacturing positions, casinos. You think about it. What happens when you get hurt at Disney World?
Beth Dombkowski:
Oh, I didn't think about that. Yeah.
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
Right? You're going to go to the infirmary there.
Beth Dombkowski:
Somebody's going to take care of you. Yeah.
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
It's probably going to be a nurse.
Beth Dombkowski:
Okay. Interesting. So nursing, is this a worthwhile field to get into? How would you advise incoming students about nursing or somebody who is thinking maybe I want to go into nursing but I'm not really sure?
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
Well, I would say start out getting exposure if you can. If you know another nurse or you have a family friend or acquaintance or anybody that you know who can help you really understand what the profession is about, I recommend that. I've had students that come back and they say, "Wonderful, that was great. I really didn't know all of these things." So remember, it's not what it is on television, on the shows.
Beth Dombkowski:
Absolutely.
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
There's a little bit of nuances there that are similar, but in all seriousness, really begin to explore. You can talk to advisors, you can talk to other leaders in the field, you can become volunteers. You can be a volunteer in a hospital. Hospitals are always looking for volunteers. So really understand it, explore it. Immerse yourself into it as best as you can as time allows and realize that it's a profession that very much takes. It's giving. It's a giving profession, right? Because my greatest leader, one of the greatest leaders I ever had always said, "Remember, your patients, it's like you are manning that airplane and it's up to you a thousand percent to make sure you land that plane safely." So patients that go into hospitals today, they're putting all of their trust in the nurse and it is so rewarding. Are there times when maybe there can be periods of sadness, you lose patients because death is imminent?
Beth Dombkowski:
It's a fact for all of us.
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
Right? It does happen.
Beth Dombkowski:
Absolutely.
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
Trauma happens and sometimes we lose patients, right? That's the reality. But even those experiences are enriching. And I personally have seen nurses grow not just as nurses, but as people for having a true value of life. I think that patients, even being a patient myself, let me take myself out and step out from the nurse role for a minute and be the patient because I've been the daughter of the patient and I've been the wife of the patient and I've been the patient. I can tell you that who you see the most of when you're being taken care of is your nurse.
Beth Dombkowski:
Absolutely. I was actually just thinking that as you were speaking. I was thinking, well, when I've been in hospital situations and settings, you see the doctor for a very short period of time and the nurse is the continual care.
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
In fairness to the doctors, that's their role.
Beth Dombkowski:
Oh, absolutely. Yes.
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
That's what they have to do. So I love my doctor. We love our doctors. We love our colleagues. But at the end of the day, the doctors will be the first to admit, they'll say, "I'm counting on my nurse. When my nurse calls me and he or she says, 'This is what's going on with the patient,' I rely on that because they're not there. They are at 2:00 in the morning." Right, kind of thing.
Beth Dombkowski:
Absolutely. So what type of people would you say should consider this as a career? You have to be a nurturer in a sense.
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Beth Dombkowski:
But you also have to have a background in science. What type of people do you find are successful in this field?
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
Well, successful people have it all, if you will. When I go to hire someone, I always looked for someone, of course I wanted somebody who did well in school and had that high GPA because look, at the end of the day, you could be that super nice person, but if you don't understand-
Beth Dombkowski:
You need to know your stuff, yeah.
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
If you don't understand chemistry and you didn't get good grade in it, so-
Beth Dombkowski:
We're going to have a problem.
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
Right. Totally. But that said, I've also had the 4.0 scholar who comes in and they don't have that customer service that I need, you know? So I can remember a situation after situation where one stands in my mind of the nurse. I had six nurses, all ... Actually we had one position and at the time the industry was flooded. We had one position and I had narrowed it down from 30 to like six applicants. They were all high hitters, all top, all equally really on the resume equal.
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
Why I hired the one that I hired was, I always ask this question. It's a behavioral type question. What do you do or can you explain a time when you had a dissatisfied customer? Because I knew she was working through nursing school. She was working in Nordstrom's. She was a shoe salesperson at Nordstrom. So I don't have to tell you, right? High end shoes, right?
Beth Dombkowski:
Absolutely.
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
Jimmy Choos can be upwards of $1,000. And I said, "Can you give me an example of a time?" She proceeded to tell me a story of an irate customer who apparently spent thousands of dollars on these shoes and came in and basically laid her out and was ready for a fight, right?
Beth Dombkowski:
Uh huh (affirmative).
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
And actually explained how she deescalated that patient or that, wasn't the patient, but the client.
Beth Dombkowski:
The customer, yeah.
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
And how she managed that and how ... I heard through that true caring, really sense of wanting to do the right thing and really customer service.
Beth Dombkowski:
Wow.
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
I hired her. She was the winner out of that lot of six people because nobody else could come close to a story that she shared with me about this irate customer who was reporting her and going to the manager and gave her false information, so and so on. So my advice then would be really realize that at the end of the day, every thing that you do and everything that happens, at the center of every policy and procedure and situation, in the center of that equation is a patient. It could be your loved one, but I can guarantee you, even if it's not, it's somebody's loved one.
Beth Dombkowski:
Absolutely. It's all about the people. Yeah.
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
Yeah, and it's the people skills and certainly the theoretical knowledge that makes the best nurse and the most successful ones for sure.
Beth Dombkowski:
Have you seen over the years any, I don't know how to say this exactly. Have people come with the same interpersonal skills over time or have you seen that change as we have new students coming up? How would you advise a student to become comfortable with that, to start talking to people and interacting in a role like that?
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
In full transparency, I think that yeah, we have. There was a time when, and we're about to come on another, we're actually in the midst of a very severe nursing shortage. What that means is that we have to create a lot of nurses, right?
Beth Dombkowski:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
And marketing starts and the lure and getting people interested starts. And that's great because people that are really good candidates go to school, they get that nursing license. The caveat there though is you can also have people who go into the field because they're told, "Hey, you're going to start out at a really decent salary."
Beth Dombkowski:
Nice salary, yeah.
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
Right? We've all heard it.
Beth Dombkowski:
Absolutely.
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
You're going to be able to work just three days a week. You're going to be able to work at double time on holiday and so on and so forth. That's all true and that's a good thing and it's important to know the perks of your job, but what happens is, is that these people don't realize that they don't have that, right, all those personal interpersonal skills I talked about? They don't necessarily have those. And they might be more prudent to work outside of the, you know.
Beth Dombkowski:
Research, something like that.
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
Yeah, something that, because ... So that is something that I think is detrimental. I had somebody one time who I was at a neighborhood picnic and somebody was there, a friend of one of their kids was there and somebody said, "Oh, well Carmen, she's a nursing teacher. She teaches and she's a nurse and she's a nurse executive." So I said to him, "Oh really? You're going to nursing school?" "Yep. I'm going to be a nurse anesthetist." Going back to school to be a nurse anesthetist. Hadn't even gone to school yet. Now nursing anesthetist, just so you know, is like a master's degree. You have to have critical care experience for like two years. It's a really a long secondary education trajectory. But in truth you start out at a very impressive salary that's not typical for nurses.
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
So I just found that that was an odd comment that he said, "I'm going to be a nurse ..." I said, "Why do you want to do that?" I couldn't help it. I probed it. I said, "Why? Why do you want to do that?" "Oh, because you know what they start at?"
Beth Dombkowski:
Yes.
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
Yeah, and that's what I said. "Oh, okay."
Beth Dombkowski:
Wow. I'm going to change gears a little bit here. Something that we've talked about a lot is the work/life balance that nurses have or that everybody has really, and you are something called a YogaNurse.
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yes.
Beth Dombkowski:
Can you tell us about that?
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
Sure. As the name would suggest, this is a registered trademark program that you can look it up. It's YogaNurse, one word, dot-com. And just at a real high level, I can tell you what it is, is that you obviously have to be a nurse, but you also have to be a yoga teacher. And that's what I was fascinated about because as a holistic nurse, and I've been a yoga teacher for a long time and practice yoga really literally since the seventh grade for me. That's obviously a long time ago. But what I loved about this particular certification was there's a lot of yoga teachers and there's a lot of nurses, but in this case you have to be both.
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
So it's very, very specialized and I loved that and I love the founder. Annette Tersigni is the founder for this, and I'm probably botching her last name, but Annette, she's on the website and she is, Annette Tersigni is amazing. She developed this program with our sole purpose, as simple as it seems, it's profound. It's expanding consciousness in healthcare.
Beth Dombkowski:
Oh, interesting. Okay.
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
That's our mantra and that's the foundation of our work. Right now I think there's only about 287 of us in the country.
Beth Dombkowski:
Oh wow. Okay.
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
Yeah, because again, it does take the two. You have to be the both things, you know?
Beth Dombkowski:
An expert in both areas.
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
You have to be a nurse and a yoga teacher and understand the principles of both. So we do a lot of our work is simple techniques and realizing that while I appreciate, and I appreciate the advanced poses in yoga and God bless all the people that can do those, I've never done a headstand. I never will do a headstand that's not supported or unassisted. I do have a stand, but I do it just, but I respect everybody who has. But at the end of the day, I think that misconception, we work on that too. That there are seven or nine branches of yoga and physical is only one of those, that in truth, mindfulness practices, stress-relief, just the sense of learning how to pause and breathe, the breath, all of those things are really the paramount and the foundation of yoga. So whatever you do physically, you can take it as far as you want, but in truth, you can get all the benefits from yoga doing a chair class if that's where you are. That's a lot of the work that we do, that literally anybody, anyone can do yoga.
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
My yoga training is through YogaFit, which is also a registered trademark. You can look that up. It's one word, YogaFit. And I think there are a lot of teachers here at Rowan because I know that there's trainings. I took my level three training here at Rowan ...
Beth Dombkowski:
Oh, did you? Okay.
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
... actually years ago in 2003 or something. It's the same premise, that yoga is not this exclusive group of people, that only some people are welcome to the club kind of thing. But in fact yoga is for everyone, every body. So every physical body, but every person.
Beth Dombkowski:
Every person.
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
For sure. So that is, the things that we do with YogaNurse is just an expansion of that.
Beth Dombkowski:
That's wonderful. So my last question for you. Why Rowan? Why Rowan for you? Why Rowan for students? Why are you here?
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
Right. Well, you did mention that I'm an alumni, and the older I get, the more I realize the importance of this statement, but Rowan's success is my success. So if I'm out in the community and I'm hearing anything positive about Rowan-
Beth Dombkowski:
It's part of you.
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
Yeah, absolutely. Conversely, I'm not going to stand for anything being negative, being said negative about Rowan because at the end of the day, we all love our university, right?
Beth Dombkowski:
Sure. Yeah.
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
I loved my undergraduate the most because I think that was more ... I did online programs and I had residencies with those. It wasn't a thousand percent online, but I loved it. And I see really, honestly, I see the benefits of all. I can argue both sides of online education versus brick and mortar. But at the end of the day, I spent a lot of time here. I graduated in '94. What's really cool and just happens to be super convenient is I live so close. I live in Washington Township, but on a quiet night on my back deck, I can literally hear the football.
Beth Dombkowski:
Oh my goodness. Really?
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
I swear to God. I'll even say to my husband, "What is that?" He goes, "That's Rowan's football games going on right now." So I'm part of the community.
Beth Dombkowski:
So it really is like home.
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
It totally is.
Beth Dombkowski:
Like coming back is coming back home.
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
Yeah. I'm sorry if that sounds corny, but I really do mean it from my heart.
Beth Dombkowski:
No, absolutely not.
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
And now having the opportunity to bring my two loves, Rowan and nursing together, it's just, I don't know. It's living the dream for me. You know what I mean?
Beth Dombkowski:
So wonderful. Great.
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
Yeah, it's living the dream.
Beth Dombkowski:
Carmen, thank you so much for coming to talk to us today.
Carmen McDonald, PhD:
Thank you for having me. It's been wonderful. Thank you.
Beth Dombkowski:
And this is Rowan Confidential.