By Matt Skoufalos
After three decades in nursing care, Meg Coley has leveraged her educational aptitude and extensive field experience into a leadership position as the vice president for surgical services operations at Virtua Health of Marlton, New Jersey.
Coley was first introduced to the idea of a health care career at a high-school job fair. She’d been headed towards a career rooted in academics, but it wasn’t until she met some of the local health professionals in her community that it felt more like a realistic possibility. Enrolling in the St. Agnes Hospital School of Nursing in Philadelphia, which was partnered with Saint Joseph’s University, Coley fell in love with the OR during an elective class in her senior year.
“I loved everything about it,” she said, “especially becoming that patient advocate; speaking on behalf of someone who couldn’t speak during their procedure.”
“Back then the diploma programs were pretty much all that were available,” Coley said. “If you were lucky enough, you went back and got an associate’s degree – but I honestly wouldn’t trade it. With the experience I gained in those diploma programs, I was able to come out with experience, take on patient care and have resources at my fingertips.”
Meg Coley with her mom Peg Coley and sister Michele Cosgrove
Coley’s career continued at Pennsylvania Hospital, where she spent a year in a post-operative orthopedic unit before entering the OR in the early 1990s, and never looked back. In all, she spent more than two decades at Pennsylvania Hospital before leaving to work for its chief of urology in private practice, for which she returned to school to earn her RNFA.
“I always had a drive for lifelong learning and continuing education,” Coley said. “It was a natural progression for me, knowing that I wanted to advance my career; to go back to get my bachelor’s and my master’s.”
“Nowadays, it’s really not an option,” she said. “Going to nursing school really requires a bachelor’s degree, and there’s so many advantages to rolling right into a master’s program.
Creating that advanced education is really important not only for oneself, but for the industry and our patients; providing evidence-based care for our populations.”
Coley traveled to Nevada for her RNFA schooling, and began working as a per-diem OR nurse at multiple institutions, finally landing at the Mount Holly, New Jersey campus of Virtua Health. Eventually, she partnered with one of the general surgeons there as an independent RNFA practitioner but remained on the Virtua per-diem staff.
“I scrubbed more than I circulated, but I did both,” Coley said. “Eventually, I jumped into education while finishing my master’s degree, and went into my AVP role for all of surgical services at the Voorhees campus.”
Meg Coley and Wife Traveling to Switzerland
For the next seven years, Coley’s role expanded into also covering surgical services at the Virtua Marlton campus, before landing the opportunity to become the vice-president of surgical services for the entirety of Virtua Health in July 2023. In her current position, she has been working to help create an infrastructure that supports new nurses learning about perioperative services earlier in their professional careers.
“One of the sad things I’ve seen is that perioperative services aren’t really afforded to nurses in their education programs right now,” Coley said. “Nursing students generally get a taste of surgical services if they do a rotation and they’re lucky enough to follow a patient to a surgical experience. That’s something we as an industry have an opportunity to take advantage of, and to share those opportunities.”
At Virtua, Coley worked with her clinical learning and academic colleagues in partnership with Rutgers University to help develop a Peri-op 101 program that would shrink the gap in OR knowledge for nursing students. Its goal is to help those students gain knowledge and fluency in surgical care versus critical care services before being exposed to the OR environment, especially if they haven’t had an opportunity to take such a course before.
Meg Coley with VIrtua OR Team
“The workforce for health care is small, and for surgical nurses it’s even smaller,” she said. “People are retiring, so we really have to rebuild the future of what perioperative nursing looks like.”
Coley is also working with Virtua leadership – including its vice president for clinical and academic affiliations, director of clinical practice and other surgical services AVPs – and advanced nurse clinicians/nurse educators, to create an internal perioperative program built upon the successes and opportunities that emerged with the Rutgers partnership.
“Surgical services are broad, but this program is specifically for the OR,” Coley said. “We’ve had a plethora of colleagues across the enterprise wanting to come into the OR, and this program will allow us to do that on a rolling, consistent basis. Our advanced nurse clinicians are all master’s-prepared with a focus on education; they created timelines through the didactic portion of it. We’re very, very excited to be doing that, knowing that we can take that into the future.”
For a nurse who came of age in a professional era when young nurses were frequently fodder for the grind of hospital culture, changing the interpersonal dynamics of the field was a personal challenge for Coley. Moving on from the adage of “eating the young” requires a concerted effort to change behavior, which she’s made a priority of her leadership efforts.
“Those of us who suffered through that period are very cognizant of that,” Coley said. “We work very, very hard to take on that model of ‘treat someone the way you want to be treated,’ and ‘teach the way you wish you had been taught.’ I think that’s important.”
Meg Coley with nieces and nephews at Halloween
“We’ve done a lot of work, and had a lot of successes, with behaviors that will be accepted and behaviors that will not be accepted,” she said. “In my new role, I’m really looking at best practices, wherever they may be, in the organization and industry-wide, and wrapping it around the overall patient experience.”
In addition to helping grow the profession, Coley also knows that bolstering professionalism in the field will help her staffers deliver high-quality health care outcomes, which reinforces consumer confidence in the experience at Virtua.
“Consumers are very savvy; we want them to see us as their destination for everything they need, including surgery,” Coley said. “I think we do a great job of that, but there’s always opportunity for improvement. I work hard with the team on overall patient experience, and that’s something that I want to continue to see grow. It’s a team effort.”
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