Kimberly Long 0:00

Hello, everyone. We are fortunate to have Anne-Marie Watkins with us today. She's the Senior Vice President and Chief Nurse Executive and Assistant Dean of Nursing Education for UC Irvine Health. Welcome, Anne-Marie.

Anne Marie Watkins 0:14

Thank you, Kim.

Kimberly Long 0:15

I'm so happy to be with you here today and spend a few minutes talking about. I appreciate that. You know, the first thing that I had that I wanted to ask you about is to tell us a little bit about your career journey and answer this question. As you look at where you are today, is it aligned with where you thought you would be?

Anne Marie Watkins 0:33

So it's interesting because I would say the answer is probably not necessarily. I started out as a PEEDS ICU nurse and was that was great until I had kids, and then I realized I needed to do something else. So I went into a unit manager role and got really promoted, as many of us did, by being tapped on the shoulder and saying, Hey, would you like to try this? I think you'd be great. And not necessarily getting all the training in the background that goes with it. And ended up in a chief nurse role. And I realized that the magical impact you could have being in that role versus it's great at the bedside, but you can impact so much more across nursing, patient care, and outcomes. And then progressively I've evolved into system roles, which just compounds that even more, that you can really have that ability to build structures that help support nurses to thrive at scale and really make a very meaningful difference. Um, you don't have the day-to-day patient contact, but you have that impact still.

Kimberly Long 1:33

Yeah, that broader breadth of influence, I think that's wonderful. And so, you know, the name of this podcast is Pulse Check. And I'm wondering if you've had any major moments in your career where you had to just pause and take a pulse check.

Anne Marie Watkins 1:48

Yeah, in fact, recently we are going through a lot of change at my organization. Um, and it's good change, it's growth. We did some additional acquisitions, we opened a new hospital, we're doing an EMR change, and that's all within a very short period of time. And, you know, it impacts nursing, but it also impacts the rest of the organization. And everyone's moving so fast. And this was probably about six months ago in meeting with our leadership team, and we just had a very good conversation about let's just pause for a second because we're seeing, we're picking up with our leaders and our coworkers fatigue and stress, and we're throwing a lot of them, a lot at them quickly in addition to their day-to-day work. So let's just stop and step back and reevaluate what we're doing. Do we have flexibility to move any of these projects out further? Can we put some in the parking lot? And doing it as a leadership team, and then also taking that down to the next level to stop a talk and have that stop, start, continue conversation on what are the things we have to do? What are the things that are nice to have that we can wait? And there's some things we're just not gonna be able to do. And we did that and we made some decisions that were hard decisions and some of it's disappointing, and things that we wanted to do with this opportunity. But it really was worth taking that time out. I mean, we do that in patient care. We do a safety stop, we do a timeout, and you have to do that in leadership too, sometimes to just say, wait a second, we gotta just stop and make sure that we have everything we need to go forward and we're being respectful of our teams and the burden that it puts on them.

Kimberly Long 3:20

Absolutely. There's so much that needs to be done, and we want to try to do it all, but we're human. Exactly. So, with all of your responsibilities as the chief nurse and assistant dean and you know, the senior vice president and all the influence that you have, where do you find your purpose in what you're doing? How do you stay connected to that?

Anne Marie Watkins 3:43

Yeah, a couple things there. One is visibility and connection, not necessarily it may be being physically present. It may be just popping into a Zoom call that I know that frontline nurses are on, communicating, like you know, they say that you have to communicate, was it seven different ways, seven different times? And just kind of having those touch points so that there is I understand what's happening at the front lines and what our nurse leaders are are dealing with, and also being able to translate that to my executive leadership team, especially in the finance realm. Like this is what's happening, this is our barriers, these are our challenges. How can we translate that across? But it's also always stepping back and thinking that I'm not gonna ask my team to do anything that I wouldn't do myself. And I'm gonna view workload changes or process changes. Those decisions need to be made by the people that are doing them, not me. And I will support those and I will advocate for those. But they really need to be the experts. And many times when you're in a leadership role, you're asked to make a decision quickly, and you know, can't the nurses pick this up or can't respiratory do this instead of this group? And you really have to push back and say, well, we have to ask that group. We we can't make that decision because we don't do the work.

Kimberly Long 4:59

That's right. Absolutely. And then the the last thing I'd like to get your feedback on is if you had an opportunity to give some advice to your younger self, what would you tell you?

Anne Marie Watkins 5:12

I would remind myself that it is a marathon, not a sprint. Someone gave me that advice not too long ago, and I keep repeating it because just like you mentioned earlier, as nurses, we want to get things done. It's gonna take too long to delegate, I'm gonna do it myself. Then we don't do a big job and we get frustrated. So it's really being able to look at something that I may not be able to finish this today, but I'm one step closer to where I want to be, and I have to pace myself because when we all get to the point where we retire and we're not doing this work anymore, we don't want to be reintroduced to our family and friends, like, oh, where have you been for the last 40 years? Because all you do is work. So, how do you balance that? And I really try to support my team in that uh because we all feel guilty and we take a day off or we we do something else, and it's we just got to stop that because it's truly about that balance. And I think we've learned a lot of that from our younger leaders that really come in with those values and can teach us a few things in that realm.

Kimberly Long 6:07

That statement means so much. And it is, you know, that reciprocal learning that we miss out on sometime. You know, I find that a lot of the incoming nurses they understand that balance much better than we do. So I think we do have some opportunity there. Thank you so much. It's quick and dirty, but we got it done.