[00:00 - 00:31]
Kimberly: Welcome to Pulse Check. To those who are listening, the guest today is Deborah Sober. She is the Chief Nursing Officer for a community hospital of Monterey Peninsula. And I want to thank her for taking some time to be with us today. This is a mini podcast, so it goes by very quickly. So the first thing I wanted to inquire about is to tell us a little bit about your career journey. And the other part of that question is where you are now. Is it aligned with where you thought you would be?

[00:32 - 01:06]
Deborah: That's a good question. Well, I've been a nurse since 1990. I graduated from Fresno State. But I've been with a community hospital in Monterey Peninsula for the last 31 years. I started as a staff nurse in the intensive care unit, and then a year later became an assistant director, and then a director of multiple different units. I became the Chief Nursing Officer in 2018. And to be honest with you, when I first started my nursing career, I never thought I'd be in leadership at all. I thought I would be at the bedside my entire career. That is where my most passion is, taking care of people.

[01:07 - 01:38]
Deborah: But when I was offered the assistant director position, you know, I was always one of those people that when a door opens, you walk through it, you check it out, you see if it's something that you might want to do. And I actually never looked back. I again thought, you know, I just aspire to be a director. And I loved that, too. I love being still at the front line, being able to work with nurses closely. Got an opportunity to take an interim position, which was an assistant VP in nursing, when the CNO did a sabbatical and did something outside of the organization.

[01:38 - 02:12]
Deborah: And so I stepped into that and I thought, well, this would be a, who gets to try out the CNO role? So I actually did that for a year. And my first six months, I guess I was complaining a lot at home. And I was finally told, you know, you don't have to do this. No one's making you do this. And it snapped me out of it. And I went, oh, my gosh, this is what I wanted to do. And it changed my entire mindset. It was just difficult adjusting. But that time actually gave me an opportunity to see what it was like. And so when I stepped into the role in 2018, not that it was easy,

[02:13 - 02:27]
Deborah: but it was it was exactly what I wanted to do. My main focus and mission, always patient safety, but second, how do I support the nurses so that they can provide the best possible care for our patients? And that is my mission.

[02:27 - 02:32]
Kimberly: It's almost like you say, I care for my patients through the people who care for my patients.

[02:32 - 02:33]
Deborah: I like that. Yes.

[02:33 - 02:48]
Kimberly: Absolutely. Well, that's wonderful. Now, you know, the name of this podcast is Pulse Check. And so my question to you is, has there been any point in your career where you had to pause and do a pulse check?

[02:48 - 03:21]
Deborah: I think there's been a couple of times. I think COVID did that to us. It flipped our world upside down to where we had to just kind of step back and do things in ways that we never never thought we'd be doing right. Who kept a mask on the entire day and never change it? Right. It made me just really stop and think, wow, what is it that I I studied for for so many years? And everything seemed like it went out the window. I had people calling me and asking me, what is this COVID? What should we be doing? And every day was like we were changing our minds on, you know,

[03:21 - 03:58]
Deborah: what the standard is around infection prevention or who wears masks or can we wear cloth masks? That whole thing made me literally stop and say, I'm not the expert on this and we need to work together to get through it. And probably a lot of people feel that way. The second one is the most recent. My organization has been union free for the time that it's been here for 90 something years. And nurses just voted in a union on Friday. And to me, that's new. You know, it's an environment that I haven't worked in because I've been here for so long. But it's something that is going to change things.

[03:58 - 04:17]
Deborah: But it's OK. But it's made me through this process kind of stop and say, what as a leader, what can we do better or together so that we all are still taking care of our patients to the best of our abilities? Because that is all of our mission. So how do we do that? Navigate it, but navigate it.

[04:17 - 04:29]
Kimberly: And what is the environment like now that the nurses feel that they need to have an intermediary? What other things are happening? You know, because sometimes it's internal and sometimes it's not.

[04:29 - 05:03]
Deborah: I think it's a mixture. But I do think I mean, it depends on who you talk to. But I do think the way that the health care environment is today with reimbursements, with how much health care costs and the uncertainty, along with the uncertainty in society, has driven some people to feel like they need some more security. I think my opinion, that's the big picture. There's always things that we should we can be working on and feel like, you know, our nurses have a voice and they're able to bring things up or stop the line or especially around patient safety.

[05:03 - 05:12]
Deborah: It didn't feel that that was the biggest thing. I think mostly it's the uncertainty of the world. That's again, my opinion. Others may have a different opinion.

[05:12 - 05:20]
Kimberly: You know, in the midst of all of that, how do you find your purpose? How do you find that passion? How do you maintain that?

[05:20 - 05:55]
Deborah: I always go back to my why, which has always been to care for people. And the people could be our patients or our teams or our community. And I've always worked mostly for community hospitals, nonprofit, where in this organization, it encompasses that mission wholeheartedly. So whenever you're trying to discuss things, new things, you name it, it's always looking at, you know, patients always seem to come first. Right. But our teams come a very close second. And how do we align that? And that actually keeps me focused and centered when the world is crazy,

[05:55 - 05:59]
Deborah: when all of these things are distracting. It's just core to me.

[05:59 - 06:08]
Kimberly: Absolutely. The other thing I'd like to inquire about is if you had an opportunity to give your younger self some advice, what would you tell you?

[06:09 - 06:40]
Deborah: This is a lesson I learned a while back, but it's something that always comes up. It's don't lead with your ego. Whenever you're starting to feel like you're getting upset about something or a situation, I always try to ask myself, is that my ego that's getting in the way? Or is it truly something that we should be upset about or whatever? But early in my career, I had those opportunities to practice those things when we were starting a cardiac surgery program. That's in itself can be pretty stressful. But me and a surgeon had a couple of conversations during that time,

[06:41 - 07:07]
Deborah: and he was pretty upset. And then I was pretty upset. And we were kind of going back and forth. And when I got up and walked out one way, he walked out the other. And later I sat down and realized that we really did have a patient safety issue. But I wasn't going to let down and I was going to protect my nurses and I'm going to do this and that. Right. But in the meantime, I actually missed something. And that was a lesson that I learned that the more that we allow that to get in our way, we're going to miss something.

[07:08 - 07:20]
Deborah: And I think that that's just one of the I learned that early in my leadership career. It still sneaks in every once in a while, but we have to keep that at bay because really, again, patience and our teams are what's our core.

[07:20 - 07:29]
Kimberly: That's wonderful advice. And I just want to thank you for taking some time out of your day to share your experience, expertise and wisdom.