AURORA | Sarah Thompson became enraptured with the field of nursing when she was in her early 20s, caring for patients at The Children’s Hospital in Oklahoma City who weren’t much younger than her.
She didn’t know it then, but at 23 she had embarked on a career path that would eventually lead her to become dean of the College of Nursing at the University of Colorado. In the decades in between, she has never lost sight of what attracted her to the career in the first place.
“I quickly realized over the years that everyone comes in contact with a nurse at some point in their lives and how important our profession is no matter where we work,” said Thompson, who started her job less than a month ago, on Aug. 27.
Thompson grew up in Virginia and has lived in Oklahoma, Kansas, and most recently Nebraska. She was previously the associate dean for academic programs at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. She moved into the Stapleton neighborhood of Denver a few weeks ago, and so far she’s been enchanted with Colorado.
“I really like it,” she said. “When I walk my dog at night and the sun is setting behind the mountains, I just have to pinch myself and say, ‘Do I really live here?’”
Thompson sought out the position to succeed retiring dean Pat Moritz because of the reputation of the Anschutz Medical Campus.
“There’s a strong research emphasis here on this campus, and there’s a strong spirit of being an entrepreneur and trying new things,” she said.
Thompson graduated with a bachelor’s degree in nursing from the University of Oklahoma and obtained her master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Kansas.
The academic and personal character requirements needed to graduate from nursing school nowadays are starkly different from when Thompson was going to school in the early 1990s.
“In this day and age, nursing school is very rigorous, it takes a lot of perseverance and a lot of hard work and determination to get through it,” she said. “It’s very hard, harder than the public really realizes.”
Not only do nurses now have to be innately compassionate, caring people but advances in technology and medicine have made nursing a more highly-skilled profession than in decades past.
Nurses nowadays must regularly care for “acute” patients, meaning those people who are extremely ill. That wasn’t the case before, when very sick patients would often die within days.
“Now with the use of technology and medical interventions, we see very acute patients and they can stay alive longer, which is great, but it makes the hospital a highly acute environment,” she said.
It’s Thompson’s belief that there will always be a need for nurses.
“We have such a shortage in the United States of primary care providers, and I think the country is looking at nurse practitioners and physicians assistants to fill that void,” she said.
As the dean of the College of Nursing, Thompson will strive to churn out well-rounded nursing graduates who can withstand the pressures of the health care field.
“Once you’re out (of nursing school) I think you have to have an understanding of the fast-paced dynamics of the health care system, coupled with a real compassion for people and where they’re at wherever they intersect with the health care system,” she said.
After she graduated from nursing school, Thompson began to understand that compassion between nurses and patients worked both ways. She recalled a time during a home health visit when she was caring for an impoverished patient who needed a kidney transplant but couldn’t afford one. His lungs would fill up with fluid and his kidneys and liver were failing.
Thompson would attend to him for about 30 minutes for several days while intravenous medications flowed through his body.
“We’d sit and talk and he’d say, ‘You’re the one person that has treated me with respect, and treated me like a human being,’” Thompson said.
That was one experience that led her to develop an interest in end-of-life care in nursing homes, which she started researching in 1996. Three of her research papers on the subject have been published in scientific journals. “Understanding what a good death is to someone is something important to talk about,” she said. “We are sometimes hesitant to have those kinds of conversations, but they are important.”
Reach reporter Sara Castellanos at 720-449-9036 or sara@aurorasentinel.com.
Comments are closed.