The pattern is unmistakable. Hearing Tracey from my office engage in small talk with each of my patients as she walks them through the hallway and brings them to her office before seeing me. The routine was always the same—pleasant conversation about how things had been going on the walk to her office, the quieting of sounds as her office door shuts and she obtains vitals. Then the reappearance of small talk and footsteps as Tracey brings the patient to my office door for their appointments with me. Sometimes I would hear snippets of Tracey saying sweet things about how patients would be in good hands with me, even when I was a brand-new provider.
Tracey is the very first nurse I worked with when I became a nurse practitioner. I’m so lucky to have worked with her. Tracey has decades of nursing experience, is incredibly personable, and is a calming caregiver. She has a way of making patients feel comforted but also tells them the difficult things they need to hear at times. Tracey cares for her patients. She really cares for them.
Tracey helped me feel confident as a new nurse practitioner in how she spoke about me to patients and how she spoke to me. I could rely on her completely and confidently to do things I asked of her. And she knew I would do all I could to make sure patients got what they needed out of appointments (clear medication instructions, follow-up appointment scheduled, refills sent to the pharmacy) so that she wouldn’t receive unnecessary follow-up calls each day. We share mutual respect, admiration, and a shared goal to genuinely help our patients get better.
In some ways, Tracey’s attributes complimented those I lacked, especially as a new nurse practitioner. I didn’t have the confidence at the beginning that was needed to make patients feel reassured. And I certainly didn’t have all the answers either. Tracey filled in those gaps by providing a sense of united calm and confidence as a team.
Tracey would also do things like give me a heads up on patients who were particularly agitated or sad because of some event that had recently happened before the patient came into my office. This heads-up allowed me to tailor our appointments, so I addressed what was most pressing in our limited time together. She would also call patients who had missed appointments multiple times in a row to make sure they were doing ok and get them rescheduled to see me. She would call pharmacies to follow up on medication delays and spend time with family members of patients who needed to talk while I saw their loved ones.
Most helpfully, Tracey would help me avoid being overwhelmed by acting as a gatekeeper between patients and me. To do my job effectively and efficiently, I couldn’t answer every patient’s phone call. Tracey was my gatekeeper who would take all my patient phone calls and then triage them in order of importance to me for follow-up or address herself. She would distinguish who needed to be scheduled for an appointment today because they ran out of medications, who I needed to talk to on the phone to clarify medication instructions, and times when I needed to come to the phone immediately to catch an elusive pharmacist about an insurance issue or take the call of a busy clinician with whom we shared a mutual patient.
Tracey did it all.
She spoiled me in terms of how good a collaborative work relationship can be. In my next job as a nurse practitioner, I worked in a short-staffed facility where there was no nurse or medical assistant to provide collaborative treatment. I needed to do a little bit of everything like obtain vitals, give injections, track down labwork, AND diagnose and prescribe medications. I knew I appreciated Tracey before, but I REALLY appreciated her after working independently in my next job.
No one can do it all. At least no one can do it all well and provide the best of themselves to patients. Teamwork is such an important aspect of being an effective, efficient (and equally important—a happy) nurse practitioner.
We all need teams, whether that’s a medical assistant, nurse, collaborating provider, or colleague with whom you work closely. Without this, we’re left feeling stressed, isolated, and eventually burned out. Luckily most organizations provide nurse practitioners with a built-in team, but that doesn’t necessarily guarantee the quality of that partnership.
It’s an added bonus as NPs that we have some insider knowledge about nurses. We know some of the experiences of our nurses because we have walked in their shoes at some point as nurses ourselves. I think that sense of knowing creates the foundation of a solid collaborative partnership.
Ensure to nurture relationships with your team members as a nurse practitioner because they make all the difference in the world in terms of how well we do our jobs and how we feel each day. Create an environment of mutual respect, a sense of partnership, and appreciation of the value they offer. You will be a much more satisfied NP if you do.
And if you’re lucky, you might get to work with a nurse like Tracey.
