By Matt Skoufalos
Growing up in Hightstown, New Jersey, Wes Foster was surrounded by nurses, including his mother, grandmother and godmother.
“In my family, you’re either a nurse or you become a cook, and I hate cooking,” Foster said.
But when Foster started his own nursing career at Mercer County Community College in Trenton, New Jersey, he failed out in the first year. It wasn’t what he’d expected, but there were complications.
At the same time that he was beginning his professional education, Foster was also providing hospice care for his terminally ill stepfather. Not long after losing one parent, his mother unexpectedly passed away as well.
“My life had a lot of competing priorities at the time,” Foster said. “Had I had the chance to do it over, I would not have started school when I did.”
“I had to wait for the universe to stop, and then go back,” he said.
After a year off, however, Foster had a much easier time completing his LPN program at the Helene Fuld School of Nursing “because I grew up in a family of nurses,” he said. He still studied hard, but education came much easier to him because the rest of his life had settled down.
That resilience is the backbone of a lesson for which Foster reaches today when connecting with his own nursing students at Mesa Community College in Mesa, Arizona.
“I failed out my first semester of nursing school, but that doesn’t define who you are,” he said. “I tell them, ‘Really make sure that this is the right time to be here.’ I try to talk with them throughout the semester when I see them struggling. ‘What is going on in your life? Let’s come up with a plan.’ ”
Foster’s own plan has changed several times throughout a decades-long nursing career. He began as a nursing assistant at a long-term care facility, subsequently worked as a nurse and respiratory therapist in a hospital environment, and then settled into a medical oncology unit at Robert Wood Johnson in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
“My stepfather died from terminal cancer, and I wound up working in the oncology field for 25 years,” Foster said. “It was simply because I was looking for a new job, and the only position they had open was in the oncology unit. I thought I would transfer out, but the next thing I knew, I fell in love with oncology.”
In 1995, Foster moved to Arizona to continue his career in medical oncology at John C. Lincoln Medical Center in Phoenix, then continued on to the Mayo Clinic Hospital in Phoenix, and the Banner Health System after that.
Along the way, his connection with patients and their families led him to work in nursing education. Foster discovered that he enjoyed it so much that he went back to school to earn a master’s degree in education, and finally left the bedside from Banner Health Thunderbird Medical Center in Glendale, Arizona to become a full-time educator at Mesa Community College.
Foster leverages his own experiences to help instill in his students a sense of the variety and freedom that exists in a nursing career. He reminds them frequently to “listen to what speaks to you” when setting the courses for their lives, and to “find what makes their hearts happy.”
“You can do whatever you want, wherever you want,” Foster said. “You don’t have to be stuck anywhere. I tell them, it’s a job, it’s not a hostage situation; you don’t have to stay. Be open to change, be open to new experiences. You’ll find what you do in some way, shape, or form.
“I always tell students, that first dream job you have to get might not be that dream after all,” he said. “I would swear to you that I was never going to be an oncology nurse. I left oncology simply because I wasn’t sure what I loved better. It just wound up that I have a stronger pull towards education. You’ll find that spot that speaks to you, that makes you happy.”
Foster’s work in education has only deepened his affiliation for his career in teaching. In 2007, he began working on one of the item writers and test development committees for the Medical-Surgical Nursing Certification Board (MSNCB). He eventually came to chair both committees, and when that term was completed, Foster subsequently was asked to chair item writers and test committees for a new credential in care coordination and transition management. Finally, after having completed that work, Foster was selected to serve on the MSNCB Board of Directors in 2016; in 2021, he became its president-elect.
“Medical-surgical nursing practice is the backbone of everything we do as nurses,” Foster said. “It covers so many areas, and is practiced in so many settings – hospital, rehab, post-acute care, home health, outpatient centers, skilled nursing, to name a few – and that is why I love it.”
“There is always something new to learn and see,” he said. “You will use all of your skills in med-surg, and you will always be a critically thinking knowledgeable worker, using many skills and techniques to provide the best care to the patients and families.”
Foster said he’s embraced fully the MSNCB philosophy that “med-surg is what you practice, not where you practice,” not only as a truism in that field, but as a broader aspect of his own philosophy that nurses bring themselves to the jobs for which they’re best suited, and not the other way around.
“I tell my students all the time that their first job may not be in a hospital,” Foster said. “It may be in a clinic or outpatient surgery suites. Most of them are all in bedside clinical positions, and very few have gone on to leadership or that NP route yet. But they still have the interest to go there, so when the time’s right, go for it. You’ll find where your home is, you’ll find your niche, you’ll be happy there, and you’ll never want to leave.”
When he’s not working, Foster said can be found “usually doing something school-related,” or working out at the gym.
