Spotlight On

Many perioperative nurses can vividly remember when they first sensed the calling to become a nurse. For Karen Elliott, it goes all the way back to when she was a little girl and got a toy nurse’s kit for Christmas. 

Elaine Geroski is the assistant vice president of patient services and chief nursing officer at West Virginia University Medicine Grant Memorial Hospital, a critical access hospital in Petersburg, W.V. 

Yessenia Salgado began her journey with an associate degree from the Beth Israel School of Nursing – now the Mount Sinai Phillips School of Nursing.

Brenda Ulmer still remembers the exact moment more than 50 years ago when she realized that a career in perioperative nursing might be in her future. Her nursing school program included rotations in the operating room, and while watching a cervical laminectomy at the VA Hospital in Atlanta, her stomach started to growl.

Ashley Bartholomew’s road to a career in perioperative nursing started out in an unusual place: as a dental technician while serving in the U.S. Air Force at just 18 years of age. While stationed overseas in Japan, she got to scrub in and assist in oral surgeries at the Navy hospital. “This inspired me to want to be an operating room nurse,” she says.

It was while working as an assistant at a nursing home in high school that Tracy Hoeft-Hoffman decided that she wanted to pursue a career in nursing. “That’s when I saw what a difference nursing can make in people’s lives,” she says. “I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, this is what I need to be doing with my career.’ ”