Transcript Video Kathreen Roberts Pediatrics and Beyond Testimonial May 19th, 2025 Kathreen Roberts Pediatrics and Beyond Testimonial May 19th, 2025 Hello, my name is Katherine Roberts. I am a pediatric critical care clinical nurse specialist. I work at the Morris Children's Hospital in Bloomington, Delaware. I am also a past president of the American Association of Critical Care Nurses and a fellow in the American College of Critical Care Medicine. Katherine, I'm so excited to run into you at NTI. How long have you been in nursing? Oh, how long have I been in nursing? I might possibly longer than I wish to tell you, but I will say at least 3 decades. What's that? And if you had the opportunity, what would you wish that you had known when you started after all this wisdom you've accumulated? There are so many things I wish I'd known, but I think one of the biggest things. I wish I had known how important it was to focus on your own mental health so that you could provide the best care possible to patients and families because you really can't give them all you need to support them through that journey and critical care if you weren't also focusing on your own mental health and your own well-being. We always say put your own oxygen mask on first, but we don't have it just coming out of the wall 24/7, so find it take it when you can. Exactly right, and I think when I started as a new nurse, as a as a baby nurse, as some people will say, there was often this approach of, hey, that's just part of being in the ICU. If you want to be a good ICU nurse, you just need to deal with it and move along, and I think we have, we've come a long way we still have further to go. But the COVID pandemic taught us a lot and it taught us that all health care providers and nurses in particular are dealing with so much stress, anxiety, depression, burnout, and sometimes to the point of suicidal ideation and beyond, and that's a problem and it's a problem we can deal with and it's a problem we can intervene. And there's more and more research being done in this area and my my hope my goal is that we'll take a step back and we'll come together as as hospitals as professional organizations, and we'll look at the interventions that that make a difference and we'll start to build them in from the get go we'll make it OK to talk about our mental health and talk about our wellbeing. Put interventions in place so that nurses have the supports they need that it's OK for us to talk about all of this with one another. And then again we use all of that to provide all the supports we need for our patients and families. And that lets us look at us that lets us look at us as individuals to take care of ourselves, and then there's the environments we work in because the environments we work in contribute to the stress, the anxiety, the distress. So you take all of that and you work on that in conjunction with healthy work environments. So you think about all the work ACNs done around healthy work environments. There are healthy work environment standards. They've now been in place for decades. And at the hospital level, the institutional level, institutions have to do more to improve the health of our work environment. So if we can work on ourselves as individuals, give ourselves the tools and strategies we need, and you're working on the health of our work environments, you put those two together, and I think you get to that sweet spot, that sweet spot where we really can make our optimal contribution to take better care of our patients and families, and that's, that's great for everybody. So we talked about making it OK to talk about your mental health. What on earth did I mean by that? I mean, sometimes it's really scary to say to someone, you know, I'm not doing so well today. And yet the truth is when you and I'm gonna talk pediatric critical care because that's where that's where my heart is. In some of the more recent research that's come out, the prevalence of, of burnout, of stress, anxiety, depression in pediatric critical care. It is reported to be anywhere from 44% to 77%, so that means on any given day you could look around at pediatric critical care unit and anywhere from 2 to 4. To 3 out of 4 of those nurses might be struggling that day and that might mean they're a little off or it might mean they're really off and that's struggling beyond just the, you know, the usual things that go on in a pediatric ICU and the usual things in a pediatric ICU are more stressful than what goes on in in your normal day to day life. That's a pretty sobering statistic, right? And if you don't feel like you can talk about that to someone, you just keep that inside and the way our our keynote speaker talked about today that builds up over time so you need to know it's OK to tell your story you need to know it's OK to go and talk to someone and to utilize resources that hopefully are available to you if they're not, we need to make them available to you. So when I say making it OK, that's what I'm talking about. Nursing doesn't even have what it needs to survive. Imagine what happens when they have what they need to thrive and when that entire team is thriving just that that synergy and that being able to give us something, you know, when our cup runneth over that only happens when the cup's full, right? Exactly. So you imagine what it's like when we're all functioning at our optimum, at our, our highest s. You know, and, and let's be honest, critical care is stressful we know that, right? And so to a certain extent we thrive on the fact that critical care is stressful and we need time to recuperate. We need time. To regenerate we need time to step away and we need to know what are the tools that can help us do that and is it mindfulness for some people it's that is it there's something called cognitive behavioral skills building and I know that sounds like a mouthful, but those are the different tools that you use to reframe your thoughts, your feelings, your behaviors, and you ingrained that in over time. And it it teaches you how to respond to situations differently. You can never control how the other person will respond, but you can control how you respond to things and that impacts you differently. So you get all of that together. And additionally change your environment and work with other people to change your environment and we do we get to that that different space and place and just imagine what patient outcomes would look like what nursing outcomes would look like if we can get to that sweet spot together right? one individual doesn't make it happen, but we make it happen together. How did you learn this? You know what? So I learned this through my work with ASCN. I've learned it through my doctoral studies which was. The long slow process. I said to somebody, I did it the hard way. I took my time slowly, a little bit at a time, but that was a good way to do it. And really through looking at the research, reading the evidence summarizing the evidence and learning from my mentors and learning from those who've been studying this for their career, so I think this is where I want to go next is to to learn more about this, to partner with the experts in all of this, and then really engage the nurses who are living this because if you just study it and you just talk about it and just read it and don't engage the nurses who are living it, I don't think we move this forward at all. How are we going to see you this week? Oh, you are going to see me see me presenting you'll see me presenting today, see me presenting on Wednesday. Totally different topics. We'll talk about very pediatric related topics today and Wednesday we'll talk about communication. I do not profess to be the expert in communication. We're gonna talk about communicating in a stressful situations because skilled communication is one of the key. Elements of a healthy work environment. So it's important to talk about that. And then you'll see me going to other people's sessions. You'll see me, of course, in the exhibit hall. I need to go check out the exhibit hall. It's important. And then it's New Orleans. You just might see me out and about in New Orleans. I can't wait. I'm looking for you on Bourbon Street. Maybe Bourbon Street. We'll see about Bourbon Street. Created by
