Beyond the Bedside: A Look at Spartans in Nursing | Page 20

TRAINED TO JUMP
OUT OF AIRPLANES…

and to Carry the Burden of Care

Choosing Nursing
at Turning Points
Skip Shipley always wanted to be a Spartan,
“I love MSU so much it’s almost a sickness,” he
says with pride. But nursing was not on his radar
at first. His mother, a College of Nursing graduate
and career army nurse who served in Vietnam,
encouraged him to pursue nursing. When money
for college ran out, he faced a crossroads.
Joining the ROTC, he received a full scholarship
as their first nursing student in 10 years.
Shipley started out as a team nurse at
Fitzsimons Medical Center in Colorado. After
completing the army’s intensive care course, he
was recruited to work in the emergency room.
There he met a retired Air Force mechanic
turned nurse, who saw something special in
this young man and mentored him. “Learn your
patients and learn patience,” the nurse told him.
Shipley watched and learned the importance of
relating to people, using good verbal and body
language, and understanding the context of
people who are hurting.
He left nursing for a time but says, “I had to
return. It was a call to service, a need to serve
people in a worthwhile way.” Back in Michigan,
he worked in the local emergency room, where
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he met another Spartan Nurse who got him
excited about nursing again. Hospital changes
brought him to another crossroads. It pushed
him to seek his MSN-NA, in spite of having to
spend 2½ years to take his prerequisites.

Serving on Military and
Civilian Nursing Teams
When called to active duty, U.S. Army
reservist Shipley is ready to support the
troops on the Army’s Forward Surgical Team
(FST). The team may be assigned to deliver
care in a combat support hospital or may
prepare combat casualties for transfer to the
hospital or tertiary care facilities. His monthly
training in the Reserves prepares him for these
roles, as well as for combat.
On the civilian side, he has worked to maintain
standards of practice. He also participated in
a joint effort of the hospital’s recovery room
nurses, surgical nurses and nurse anesthetists
to implement a new reporting system. The
Situation, Background, Assessment and
Recommendation (SBAR) Report structures
and standardizes communications between
caregivers to ensure efficiency and accuracy,
and track and improve patient outcomes.

Sharing What Inspired
Him into Compassionate
Communication
At MSU, Shipley says, “I was inspired by my
professor to treat people the way you want
people to treat your mom, or yourself when it’s
your turn.”
On the job, he continues to teach leadership
and communication skills to younger nurses.
As he says, “In any given moment, your choice
of words, the way you present them, and how
they are received can mean the difference
between failure and success. How do you make
patients and their family members trust you in
the five minutes before you wheel them into the
operating room? Or tell the family to go home,
that you understand they are tired, and ask
them to let you carry the burden for a while?
How to explain that they haven’t gotten to the
hard part yet and will need to be strong?”
Shipley feels that “practitioners need to teach
anything they can to anyone who will listen. If
you say the right thing at the right time in the
right context, you change lives. Little things
aren’t little. And you may never know the impact
you had.”