By Mike Bush
The Triton Group
Dawn Tschabrun says it’s her job to make sure that Roswell Regional Hospital provides quality nursing care to its patients.
Tschabrun assumed her duties as the hospital’s Chief Nursing Officer on Dec. 1.
“The Chief Nursing Officer is responsible for overseeing all patient care from the nursing perspective, whether it’s outpatient services or inpatient services,” she said. “That responsibility includes ensuring that we’re meeting all the appropriate national standards in the delivery of patient care.”
She said that Roswell Regional is currently doing a good overall job of providing patient care, as demonstrated by patient-satisfaction surveys in which 80-85 percent of patients said they were “very satisfied” with the hospital’s care – higher than any hospital with which she has been associated, and higher than the national average.
This high rating was one of the reasons she came to the hospital, Tschabrun added.
“Something’s working in this facility that I have not seen in other facilities, and that is our connection to the patient,” she said.
“I’m excited about being here,” Tschabrun added. “It’s a great facility and the potential, it’s almost like we’re just taking flight.”
She said she is impressed with the hospital staff.
“I think they are a staff who care greatly for their patients (and) provide care from their hearts,” she added. “They want to do, and are doing, the right things for patients.”
But there’s always room for improvement. Areas that Tschabrun wants to address at Roswell Regional include professionalism and customer-service issues.
“And I also want to address and define the practice of nursing both as a science and as an art form for our facility, getting us into alignment with those national standards that are tried and true,” she said.
Tschabrun said her objective in 2010 is to help Roswell Regional nurses “grow within their profession, to become strong clinicians, to be able to acquire knowledge.”
She compared nurses to handymen who have many tools in the their tool belts and in toolboxes.
“I want to make sure that by next year, I load up their toolboxes from a clinical nursing perspective, that they have resources and that they have state-of-the art information on the care of patients…so that we can be even better than we are today,” she added.
She acknowledged that Roswell Regional, like any other hospital, has challenges in maintaining nursing staff.
When she graduated from nursing school in 1985, there were only two states where nurses were being hired, Texas and Alaska. Currently, however, there is a shortage of nurses, compounded by the fact that nursing colleges don’t have the faculty necessary to produce the number of qualified nurses needed.
“It’s an ongoing issue,” she said. “It’s a pure supply-and-demand issue. Until universities are able to provide more faculty to train nurses, demand will continue to exceed supply.”
She said she hopes to get involved with the nursing program at Eastern New Mexico University-Roswell to see what the hospital and school can do together.
Tschabrun worked with the University of Texas when she was in Austin, and with New Mexico State University and Dona Ana Community College in Las Cruces.
As a supervisor of nurses, “I’m the end user of the product,” Tschabrun said, adding she can “help the schools look at the curriculum and competencies to ensure that what they produce is a functional clinician who can step into a current health-care facility and be a productive member of the staff within the profession.”
She sad she hasn’t had a chance to examine the ENMU-R nursing program; she is focusing all her energies right now on her hospital responsibilities.
“Every morning I make rounds, and I check on all the nursing units to see what’s up,” Tschabrun said.
She wants to understand the staff, and wants them to understand her “so we can work together to assure that we take excellent care of patients.”
Another of her goals is to provide stability in the nursing staff.
“This is a great facility, an absolutely phenomenal facility with tons of potential, and it’s exciting to be here today,” she said.
Tschabrun was born and raised in Nebraska, graduating from Creighton University in Omaha with a bachelor of science in nursing in 1985. She began her nursing career in Abilene, Texas, where she worked in a telemetry heart unit, and then quickly transitioned into an intensive care unit.
She spent some five years in Abilene, where she realized that her passion was cardiac care.
“I really wanted to be a nurse who worked with patients who had had open-heart surgery,” she said.
So she moved to Austin, where she worked at two facilities in cardiovascular nursing.
Then she became a house supervisor, a clinical position that functioned as a central control, keeping track of who is being admitted and discharged, when the next patient is arriving and whether to bring in more staff or send some home.
In that position, Tschabrun discovered she enjoyed leadership. She became director of a medical-surgical unit in an Austin hospital, where she was involved as a construction liaison for a new unit.
Then she became director of nursing practice – in effect, assistant chief nursing officer — and became responsible for all policies, procedures, quality of nursing care and regulator compliance that impacted nursing.
She earned a master of business administration from St. Edwards University in Austin.
“I thought, ‘You know, I really want to be a chief nursing officer; that is my passion, because as a leader I can change the dynamics of nursing care for a facility, and that’s where my best work will occur.’” she added.
Tschabrun looked around Austin, and noted the chief nursing officers at all the area hospitals had been in their positions for a while and were not likely to be leaving soon, so she contacted a recruiter who found her a position at Mountain View Hospital in Las Cruces.
She had been there more than three years when Rod Schumacher, Roswell Regional chief executive officer, called her and asked her to come to Roswell.
“I came up here a couple of different times, looked at the facility and chatted with the staff and the physicians,” she said. She also was talking to a hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio, but decided Roswell Regional was the best choice for her and her family.
“As I said, it had huge potential here, the opportunity to work with Mr. Schumacher, and it also moved me back a little more centrally located to Texas and Nebraska.”