Bowling Green is blessed to have an excellent medical facility in the form of TriStar Greenview Regional Hospital, a facility full of doctors, nurses, and staff who constantly serve the community. Two staff members in particular work behind the scenes to make the service offered the best it can be: clinical educators Kim Riddle and Adriana Rosas-Vaca.
The responsibility of a clinical educator is to assess nursing staff, determine their expertise, and create ways to fill gaps in knowledge. Riddle and Rosas-Vaca bring in resources and host classes that cover electrocardiogram monitoring, rural trauma, and critical care essentials, among many other topics. It isn’t a job that gets much glory, but it is integral to keeping the quality of care high.
“Bringing classes such as this to Bowling Green is important so that nurses can build on the skills and knowledge they already have,” Riddle said. “It makes them better prepared for what may walk into our doors or what they may see out in their communities.”
Riddle found clinical education after several years of working as a full-time nurse. She decided she needed a change in her career and wanted to continue helping people in a different way. “I have always loved to teach, and it seemed like a natural transition to make,” Riddle said. Much of Riddle’s career has been in the emergency room, and she and her husband work as volunteers and on the Barren County Search and Rescue Team, so her specialty and focus as a clinical educator became the emergency department. Rosas-Vaca, on the other hand, spent much of her nursing career in the intensive care unit and the recovery room, and she focuses on the needs of those areas. She was directed to clinical education by a co-worker who saw her helping students and consistently trying to learn more.
“I like to be challenged, and so in clinical education, you’re challenged with keeping up with best practices and keeping up with what’s the newest, best medicine,” Rosas-Vaca said. “That was kind of a natural progression.”
Their work empowers the TriStar Greenview staff to take control of their learning and their progression in the medical field. Rosas-Vaca said several have taken on the teaching responsibility and have been helping in that capacity.
“I engage them in teaching others because I like to find their gifts,” Rosas-Vaca said. “Everybody has a gift; we just have to find it and empower them to use [it].”
If a nurse hasn’t worked in a particular sector of the hospital, the clinical educators will give them the opportunity to learn those new skills. If several nurses don’t have experience with specific equipment, Riddle and Rosas-Vaca will conduct a training session.
It isn’t an easy job. Clinical educators must be up to date with what they are teaching and find ways to meet people’s needs through the hectic schedule nurses keep. One way to work around that is to pair learning with a lunch break or to have multi-day workshops. Riddle said she hopes to continue both of those strategies.
“My hope is that staff will use these opportunities to grow themselves and seek out advanced certifications,” Riddle said.
