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By Matthew Skoufalos

For Ohio native Danielle Hostler, nursing is a second career. When she and her husband moved from the Buckeye State to North Charleston, South Carolina, he was taking a firefighter job at Boeing, and she was working as a seventh-grade English teacher – both jobs that were hard to come by in Ohio. Although she found teaching rewarding, Hostler said she struggled with some of its more bureaucratic demands.

“I had an idealistic idea of what I wanted it to be, but reality didn’t match up,” she said.

OR Today Magazine | Spotlight On | Danielle HostlerWhen Hostler had finally burned out on the classroom, she realized she needed a change – and headed back to school. After earning an associate degree in nursing at Trident Technical College, Hostler worked nights as the unit secretary at the Medical University of South Carolina and attended nursing classes there during the day. In a facility that handles transplants and “quite a bit of trauma,” it wasn’t a ramp-up approach, but it prepared her to manage the responsibilities of her new career.

“It was kind of a weird trajectory, but it gave me a feel for the OR,” Hostler said. “Sometimes I was the only one at the desk and you’d have to follow up right away. I think it was a godsend that I got put in that situation.”

After Hostler graduated, she began working as a staff nurse in the main operating room at MUSC, and after five years, was promoted to ENT coordinator for ambulatory surgery. Today, she supervises eight nurses, works with 11 doctors, and is pursuing a master’s in informatics, which allows her to apply her clinical knowledge base to other areas of her profession.

“I do like nursing because I can do something right away and then immediately see the result of it,” Hostler said. “I still really enjoy the education part of it, and that was part of the reason why I went back for my masters.”

To Hostler, the OR is an exciting place to work. She enjoys scrubbing in for surgery, has a keen interest in technology, and appreciates the variety of the day-to-day responsibilities. Pretty quickly, she realized that surgery and surgical nursing were where she was meant to be, amid the steady stream of information and the demands it places on the mind to analyze, process and prioritize.

“It can be really stressful at times,” Hostler said. “There’s constantly things coming to you. It’s a lot of putting out fires, troubleshooting on the fly; there’s a technical aspect.”

“It’s just a totally different field of nursing than typical floor nursing,” she said. “There’s a certain amp to it all. If everything’s clicking right, it’s a really great experience. It’s also a neat interaction you have with the patients and their families.”

OR Today Magazine | Spotlight On | Danielle HostlerThe other chief aspect of her position involves integrating and managing the demands of working with several “strong personalities … in a productive way,” Hostler said. When she became responsible for taking equipment requests to decision-makers, it changed her view of her relationship with doctors, too.

“[Doctors are] customers: you want to keep them there,” Hostler said. “You also have to keep in mind what they’re asking for. Some of them want the things with all the bells and whistles without paying attention to the costs; sometimes you have to bite your tongue with some of the things that they say.”

Overall, she said, the doctors in her department “respect the nursing staff, and they work really well with us. The nurses are excellent on the team as well, which really helps. It’s nice to work with a good team.”

Besides working to coordinate a fluidity of experience among professional staff, Hostler said she enjoys the brief but intense bonds that are formed among caregivers and their patients. Her experience as a schoolteacher also comes in handy in forming connections with pediatric patients; particularly her understanding of educational psychology and child development, which Hostler said has helped her to become a better nurse.

“You only see them for a few moments before they go to sleep, and you only have a few minutes to establish trust with them and their families as well,” she said. “It’s interesting to have to build that relationship with parents.”

Hostler is a parent herself, too: she’s mother to five-year-old and one-year-old girls and a four-year-old boy. She says her life as a nurse has been broadened by the experience of parenting as much as it has by being an educator. Today, when she works with pediatric patients, she thinks as much about the life-changing effects of successful surgeries as the demands of the surgeons. Hostler said she’s working to “close the loop” between patients as often as she can. One of her favorite applications of that principle has been to send nurses who work on cochlear implant procedures – hearing aids for children born deaf – to their pediatric audiologist’s office when the devices are first activated.

“That’s one of the things you always want,” Hostler said; “you wish you could follow up with patients to see what their outcomes are. [The nurses] really love that, and it’s made them a lot more passionate about the work they do as well. They get to talk to the parents. They’re really happy.”

As for the burnout that once caused her to switch jobs from the career she believed would be her life’s work, Hostler doesn’t foresee the same risk in the health care business.

“If you don’t like a certain area, there’s many other areas you can try out and see what fits you best,” she said. “In my unit, there’s a lot of experience, and they all enjoy their jobs, and it’s refreshing to see that.”

“I think one of the best things about nursing is that you can change,” she said.

 

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