Kimberly Long 0:00

All right, we are so fortunate to have Valerie Cara with us today. She is the Associate Chief Nursing Officer at Redlands Community Hospital. Welcome, Valerie.

Valerie Kaura 0:11

Thank you for having me, Dr. Long. I'm so excited to sit down and chat for sure.

Kimberly Long 0:15

Absolutely. You know what? We always enjoy chatting, don't we? Okay, so let's start out with, you know, the position that you're currently in. Do you feel that it was aligned with what your original career goal was? And if not, how did you deviate?

Valerie Kaura 0:32

Well, there's many stories in that whole process, as I'm sure as many of the people you've talked to. I mean, in my career path, I've always known from early on I wanted to be a nurse and I wanted to make a difference in people's lives. My family is very mission-driven and spiritual care pastors. And so I knew I wasn't aligned well to be a pastor or a pastor's wife, but I knew I wanted to do something different. And definitely it was helping people. So I always knew I wanted to be a nurse. I think what solidified it was obviously when my mother, I mean, a lot of my team here knows the story, my senior year in high school, she was diagnosed with hypersensitivity vasculitis, which is an autoimmune disease. We're not well off. We didn't have insurance, and we were at the county facility, and she got excellent care because they saw who she was and what she needed, and was given 48 hours to live. And so the care that was provided that we were able to see from the family, you know, me a senior year, and knowing I wanted to be a nurse, but seeing it in action and see that the nurses were the ones who were educating me, making sure that I knew to have hope and believe in miracles, even though I believed in miracles. But when it's your loved one, you know, on the bed, it changes things for sure. Knowing that they spent the time explaining to my father what she was going through so that he could understand it, so that he could explain it to our families on what was happening with her and how we were gonna get through this. And so I just took all of those experiences and really said, okay, this is what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna make it happen. I had to do it at the step level. So I did MA to LVN to RN, and I got blessed and fortunate to find Redlands Community Hospital and started here as an LVN and then as a new grad RN. And I never in my mind envisioned what happens after you become a nurse. It's nursing, and everyone tells you you can do everything. Once you're a nurse, you can branch off. You don't necessarily always have to stay acute care. There's so many things you can do. And I think you take it for granted until you're in the positions. And then leadership, I don't think that was ever my career path. It's just the door opens, right? So it was a conversation, an opportunity, and saying, Yeah, I can help you. And I knew I was gonna go back for my bachelor's degree, and the interim manager position came up and I was like, sure, I'll help you as long as you help me. I'm almost done with school and work around my schedule, and they're like, sure. And then I realized I loved it, and I went straight into a master's program and I just never looked back. I just loved helping the staff. I think it really engaged into my purpose and making sure that I was helping people, that it just kept going twofold, threefold over by the fact that you had this huge staff that you needed to engage and they needed to love work and they needed to understand their purpose and how they were making a difference in everyone's lives. And and you go from your assignment of four or five to a 40-bed unit and the impact, and it just kept kind of growing.

Kimberly Long 3:30

Oh my goodness. You know what? That just listening to your evolution is so encouraging, and I know that there's a lot of people who gain hope from that. In the course of all of this, has there been a time when you just had to pause and just take a pulse check?

Valerie Kaura 3:46

Yeah, and I mean every day. Am I spot? No. Yeah, for sure. You know, I talked about when I got into the leadership position and I was finishing my bachelor's degree, and I went quickly into a master's program as a family nurse practitioner. And the director positioned opened up, and I knew I wanted it. Like I loved the work I was doing and my coursework with my master's, and I was loving the clinical experience. I loved understanding the medical model, the pathophysiology of, you know, the clinical condition and understanding that. And I thought, is there gonna be a gap if I really do want to go to the director position? And I marched into my CNO's office and I said, Am I doing it right? Do I need a course correct? Do I need to stop my NP and go for healthcare administration or executive leadership or leadership? Like, should I adjust? And I think she had a great humbling conversation of appreciate what you're learning now and know that it's gonna bring something to the table. We need experts at everything at the table. So, yes, I already have healthcare leadership directors and I already have directors that focus on this. But if you want this position, you're gonna bring something else to the table. And education and something, no matter whether it's expert or not, could be applied. And so, will it help in conversations with our physician peers? Would it help with policy development or order set development because you understand the medical model? Yes, it would. And I don't think it's gonna be for naught, right? And so she encouraged me to continue, thankfully, because it would have added time. But I think it really just gave me kind of like just understanding I was doing the right thing. And though I did not go and practice as a nurse practitioner, that it would not be wasted time. And that was excellent advice as a mentor that she was able to provide me because I feel like I have been able to provide oversight of some programs that maybe I wouldn't have felt as comfortable had I not been the NP part of it too.

Kimberly Long 5:51

I think that that pivot is always the diversity in knowledge expertise is always beneficial when you're in a group of people. So I think that that's absolutely amazing. Sometimes when we get into leadership positions, we get so busy that you know we lose touch with our purpose. How would you advise incoming executives on how to maintain connection with their purpose?

Valerie Kaura 6:16

Well, understanding what is your purpose is so important. And I think there's a lot of people in leadership that are not really engaged with their why. Why did I want this in the beginning? So for me, why nursing? You can get it really lost in translation if you focus just in my position right now as an AC, you know, what's my why now? It should not be very different on why I even wanted to be a nurse, right? To make a difference every day, to influence families as best as you can. But also as I've gone through leadership, it's to provide a healthy workplace so that the nurses and the teams feel comfortable working together, that they feel supported, that they love coming to work, that they feel like they're part of a family. Why? Because that's gonna make a difference at the bedside, right? That's gonna add time for them to have meaningful connections with their patients. And so that's my why. And so knowing your why, finding time to engage in that is so important. So we do in our staff meetings, we do caring moments. A lot of organizations do this. If you offer that for your staff so they could share, not only when they feel like their light is dimming, it's a reminder that someone is making a difference out there. Maybe I haven't been able to be appreciated. Nobody's told me thank you recently as a bedside nurse, but I'm hearing that things are happening and I am gonna take time to reflect on that. So you want to offer them that availability, and then you need to make sure that we're making meaningful connections, right? So we're going out and we're hearing the stories, that we go to the staff meeting so we can hear the things that are happening at the bedside. It reminds us being connected with the staff to understand what are their barriers. So here we are, we say we're the voice of nurses, but if we never take the time to hear them, we can't be their voice at the boardroom. So finding the time to go, even if it's 10 minutes gap in a meeting, like run out. Um if you're staying late at a late meeting, then you know, before you get your bag, do a quick run through a unit and just say, How are things going? What is there anything I can help you? Or if you know you just worked on a rollout, how is it going? Is it working? Because sometimes rollouts don't land well. And if you never ask, you're never gonna know to bring your team back in and look at it. So I think that's my best advice is stay meaningfully connected to your team. Make sure they know who you are, make sure you're open, your doors open, and if they're not willing to come down to where you are, that you take the time to go to them.

Kimberly Long 8:42

That's absolutely right. Considering all of that, if you could go back and give advice to your younger self, what would you say to you?

Valerie Kaura 8:50

Oh, that's a good one. Because I was uh I will say I was challenged a lot. I asked a lot of questions. Sometimes maybe people thought it was difficult. Um, I'm sure some people thought she's always laughing. Is she taking things seriously? And in reality, for me to love what I do, I need to love what I'm doing and I need to have fun while I'm doing it. I need to make connections with people, I need to be engaged. And at times I'm gonna laugh and I'm gonna storytell and I'm gonna say a joke. And my younger self, I would say, don't let people judge you in that. You're gonna grow into your own. Take your time. I think one of the other things that I in reflection is to make sure that you appreciate the connections you've made. Um, because in reality, everyone that I come through across my career, I've learned so much from. And I don't think I realized that they were truly mentors until I started saying how they said it. I start giving advice the way I heard them say it. As a new guy that had a preceptor tell me, you know, you're on a stage. You're, you know, in nursing school, they'll teach you exactly how to do something, right? You learn how to give patient education by hearing five other nurses do it. And then you make it your own. And I think that was like the best advice I received as a new generation nurse, and I've applied it along the way because nobody prepares you to be in the boardroom or at the executive level. You learn from all of those experiences along the way, from your preceptors, your managers, your previous directors, your previous CNOs, your current CNOs, and the CC by each supports you. You learn so much, and eventually, I think you appreciate all those experiences when you've been able to filter all that out, right? It takes a while to appreciate those things, but eventually you get there. So my advice is take your time to listen, to not judge the people who are trying to teach you, because I think everyone has a good reason to have the conversations, right?

Kimberly Long 10:45

Oh, that's wonderful. Valerie, thank you so much for taking some time to share your wisdom and expertise today.