Alexis Chaudron took a circuitous route to begin her career as an OR nurse, but the twists and turns in her path have made it all the richer for the experiences.
Chaudron began her pursuit of a medical degree at Johns Hopkins University after high school, but changed her major from pre-med to public health as an undergraduate. Focusing on the opportunities of community and preventive health rather than just treating ailments had exposed Chaudron to the business and legal aspects of health care, and so she continued her studies at the graduate level, earning a master’s in healthcare administration at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.
The UNC school of public health further refined Chaudron’s focus on preventive health with its emphasis upon quality and process improvement. From there, she went to work in health care consulting and at a group purchasing organization. Yet, as well-rounded as her resume became, Chaudron felt like she was still missing the experience of bedside care.
“It gave me a very different vantage point for looking at health care,” she said. “I still yearned for that patient-provider relationship, and went back to Johns Hopkins for nursing school.”
In the course of her studies, Chaudron fell and broke her arm, which she describes as a stroke of good fortune. Without another place for her to continue her studies, Chaudron was assigned to the operating room in an observatory capacity to keep her clinical hours going.
“That truly is what started my career,” she said. “The OR is so fascinating. It was the first place that I got to interview patients, and have them get enough faith and trust in you to take care of them when they’re asleep on the table. I didn’t think there was anything more important than being a patient advocate for someone who can’t communicate for themselves. As someone who had been around the health care block, I felt I would be really good at it.”
After graduating, Chaudron’s first opportunity in the OR training program came at Georgetown University, where she said she received “comprehensive orientation in every surgery service line under the sun,” and settled on orthopedics.
“I entered the operating room with this different perspective because nursing was a second career for me,” Chaudron said. “I already had an eye for efficiency and quality; the OR basically put everything together for me. It was fascinating, and because of my background in health care admin and business, I went quickly through the ranks.”
In the operating room at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital, Chaudron developed first-hand knowledge of the administrative responsibilities that apply to the surgical space, which she leveraged into a promotion to nursing supervisor. Dealing with “all the sticky situations in the middle of the night” afforded her the opportunity to grow her knowledge base by exploring the whole-hospital picture. Whether she learned about patient flow, bed placement, triaging patients, or delivering care, the various perspectives afforded her a different outlook from her clinical experiences in the OR. When Chaudron moved back to California to get a job as an evening charge nurse at a local community hospital, she was well equipped, both from leadership and theoretical perspectives.
“It was my first work outside of an academic institution, and a really great opportunity to flex my leadership muscles with a small team, and try to run the evening,” she said. “In any OR, the evening team is really a family with skeleton resources. You have to lean into each other and trust, because we have to work together as a team.”
From there, Chaudron earned her first managerial role at a hospital in the University of Southern California system, and then she took an opportunity as a nurse manager at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). It was the biggest facility she’d managed, but afforded her progressive leadership experience, a path to a directorship, and an expanded scope of responsibility from there.
“It helped hone my leadership voice and skills in terms of looking at things from the perspective of budget management planning, staff optimization and hours,” Chaudron said. “I got to learn a lot and was exposed to a lot very quickly.”
Since leaving UCLA, Chaudron began interim nursing work and has built a robust business as an expert medical witness. In those circumstances, she has been able to apply her theoretical and practical knowledge of nursing leadership and management to performance improvement for a variety of health care institutions, and has herself benefited from the educational opportunities they present.
“You can always do better the following day than you did the day before,” Chaudron said. “These situations have just given me so much opportunity to learn for myself and to help educate the team. It has certainly been eye-opening and cool to throw in all the experience I have had as a nurse of 14 years and see how much improvement I can do in a short time.”
Not one to rest on her laurels, Chaudron also recently completed her educational doctorate at Vanderbilt University, which will enable her to consider teaching and preparing the next generation of nurses. In a collection of advanced degrees, it’s the first that she has earned outside of medicine, and Chaudron hopes to leverage it in pursuit of nursing recruitment and continuing education.
“As a nurse, it is important for us to stay abreast of industry trends, equipment, and make things easier for the staff so there’s not as many barriers as I experienced,” she said. “As the focus continues to be on cost-effectiveness and process efficiency, I think it’s going to continue to tighten, and people need to be open-minded.”
When she’s not working, Chaudron enjoys destination hiking, and has traveled around the world to places as far-flung as Mount Kilimanjaro, the Swiss Alps, Chile and Japan. She also operates a medical travel company, Passport Surgical Partners, which helps connect patients with providers in Costa Rica and Colombia to access more affordable and timely medical, surgical and dental care.
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