Brittany Carnahan

I've just always been drawn to the health care field, and just being able to help people, whether it be prevention of disease or helping them in their most difficult times with illness. It's just a really rewarding career. We see people at their best for wellness and preventative stuff, and then also at their worst. And being able to help in both of those situations is really fulfilling.

What was one of your most memorable nursing experiences?

So right at the end of my last year of nurse practitioner school,was when COVID started. I was already in a clinical rotation. And it was interesting because all winter we had been seeing people with these illnesses and we didn't know what they were. But they were really, really sick. And then it must have been March. I had just a couple of months left at school and we found out about COVID. We got taken out of our clinical rotations, and basically had to finish up our stuff online.

What skills are most important for nurses?

I think just being a good listener and listening to patients and what they have to say, because they're living in their body every day and we only see them for a short period. So taking their complaints, and their thoughts about maybe what's going on with them seriously. It can go a long way in helping them with whatever they're facing at that moment.

What is the best advice you can give?

Commit to being a lifelong learner. There are so many changes in healthcare all the time, and just staying up to date with those changes, reading journals and new studies that come out, and just always wanting to further your knowledge in the field, because there's so much to know.

What does it take to be a nurse in challenging times?

I think you're having a positive attitude and remembering why you got into this field in the first place can really help to get you through those times when you're sometimes wondering why you chose this career.

Any final thoughts?

There are so many different things that you can do as a nurse. It's such a diverse field, you can be working with patients or there's nursing informatics, and there's so much to this career that people can do with it.