#melissa fitzpatrick

Melissa Fitzpatrick continues to maintain active engagement and involvement within the nursing profession, particularly as a leader and member of numerous national healthcare and nursing organizations. One such organization is the American Nurses Association (ANA) that provides both a voice for and representation of over 3 million registered nurses throughout the United States.

A member of North Carolina’s District 11 ANA Chapter since 2001, Melissa Fitzpatrick shares the organization’s ongoing and unwavering commitment to working in the best interests of all registered nurses throughout the U.S., as well as its efforts to support high standards for nursing practice across the country. The ANA also works to promote work environments built on safe and ethical foundations, and to raise awareness of healthcare issues relevant to both nursing professionals and the public at-large.

Previous post: Melissa Fitzpatrick: Teaching Critical Care

As a longtime leader in the nursing profession, Melissa Fitzpatrick constantly strives to enhance and improve nursing for professionals and patients alike. She has and continues to serve as a role model to thousands of nurses throughout the world and to advance and advocate for the profession of nursing with passion and dedication.

Fitzpatrick is a highly sought-after motivational speaker by nursing and healthcare organizations throughout the country. She currently resides in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Melissa Fitzpatrick has been a registered nurse since 1977, after she received an Associate’s Degree in Nursing from Gwynedd-Mercy College. She went on to earn her Bachelor of Science in Nursing in 1979, also from Gwynedd-Mercy and then her Master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania.

Previous post: Melissa Fitzpatrick: Teaching Critical Care

The top priority of any nurse, she says, is to meet the needs of patients, families, and communities. She decided on a career in nursing after discussing her options with her parents, and initially decided to become a pediatric nurse. “I did not last long in pediatrics,” she recalls, because we lost several children to leukemia in my first clinical rotation. I did however, fall in love with the adult critical care environment.” By the age of nineteen she was a staff nurse in an Intensive Care unit in Philadelphia, where she was taught by those who became her professional mentors and role models.

One such mentor, Melissa Fitzpatrick says, was her Chief Nurse Executive, Carol Hutelmyer, who took a chance on her and let her establish a critical care course. Melissa Fitzpatrick loved the teaching experience, and her ability caught the attention of a University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing faculty member who heard her present on sudden cardiac death. Melissa took her suggestion that she submit her presentation to a national critical care conference. It was accepted, and “launched my speaking career and gained my access to an incredible network of colleagues and role models.”

Read this post as well: Melissa Fitzpatrick Calls on Chief Nurse Executives to Fulfill Their Essential Role

Melissa Fitzpatrick is a nursing professional who has held a variety of nursing and healthcare leadership roles since becoming an RN in 1977. She credits some of those she has met along the way with playing critical mentoring roles in her developing career.

One of the first to recognize her potential was Chief Nurse Executive Carol Hutelmyer, who allowed her to create a critical care course at a Philadelphia hospital. Other opportunities evolved from there and Melissa Fitzpatrick realized that she loved speaking in public and teaching critical care nurses.

Previous post: Melissa Fitzpatrick: An Exhilarating Time

She left Philadelphia in 1986 to lead a busy multidisciplinary Intensive Care Unit at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in New Hampshire. “Within a few months, someone took a chance on me again,” she says. “Sandy Dickau promoted me to become the youngest-ever vice president at DHMC, leading critical care and cardiac services. I loved every day in that role and worked with an extraordinary team that achieved many milestones.” Those milestones, she continued, included the creation of the first helicopter program in that region and designing and moving into a brand-new facility in Lebanon, New Hampshire.

Read this post as well: Melissa Fitzpatrick Calls on Chief Nurse Executives to Fulfill Their Essential Role

Summary: Melissa Fitzpatrick is a thought leader in nursing who says that too many CNEs have relinquished an essential duty when it comes to technology

Location: Chapel Hill, NC

Melissa Fitzpatrick has held a variety of clinical and leadership roles in the nursing profession over a career that has spanned more than thirty-five years. She is a past president of the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses and a Fellow in the American Academy of Nursing.

The nursing profession, she says, is fundamental to the provision of safe and effective healthcare. The healthcare environment may be rapidly changing but she says that nursing is a constant. “The nurse, in a collective sense, is the healthcare professional who’s with the patient and family 24/7/365.”

There are things she has learned about the industry that have concerned her. “One thing that has surprised me, and that I am determined to change, is the abdication of many CNEs of their role in clinical technology decision-making,” Melissa Fitzpatrick said in 2015, referring to Chief Nurse Executives. “Time and again, I meet with CNE peers who have delegated the decisions on monitors, pumps, beds, nurse-call systems, etc., to the staff nurses and their managers and have totally disengaged from the process.” Their decisions are not always in the best interest of patients and caregivers. “Even in the most robust shared-governance models, the chief nurse executive still has an essential role to play in strategic decision-making related to industry partnerships and the integration of clinical technology at the point of care.”

Too often, she continued, the insights of nurses are not sought or heard, when expensive and long-term decisions are made. “I try to elevate this issue in conversation with every healthcare leader I meet,” she said. “In addition, I partnered with AONE [the American Organization of Nurse Executives] to convene a Day of Dialogue that resulted in the publication of the ‘Guiding Principles for Nurse Leaders to Leverage Technology to Enhance Outcomes for Patients and Their Caregivers.’ I was able to present this work with my AONE colleague Judy Husted at the HIMSS [Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society] conference, and I have seen these guiding principles serve as a great resource to nurse leaders as they approach technology decisions.”

Melissa Fitzpatrick remains active as a member of many national nursing and healthcare organizations and Boards. She lives with her family in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

About: Melissa Fitzpatrick elevates the role of nurses

Melissa Fitzpatrick says that as a child, she wanted to become an interpreter at the United Nations. She focused on that goal and did the things she felt would pave the way: she learned three languages fluently and lived abroad during high school. Then it occurred to her that English was becoming everyone’s second language and that her services as a linguist would not be needed.

She turned to nursing and immediately gravitated toward the critical care environment. She “quickly realized that nursing is the heart of patient care and a true lifeline for patients and their families,” she says today. She had the good fortune to be mentored by outstanding clinical nurses. “My role models taught me how to prioritize, to think critically, and to assert myself as an advocate for my patients and for myself.” She began to teach critical care nurses, and this led to further opportunities in teaching, speaking and writing.

Along the way she worked at hospitals in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and North Carolina. “I was recruited to Duke University Health System to become the senior associate chief operating officer and CNE [Chief Nurse Executive],” she says. “It was an exhilarating time and an opportunity to spread my leadership wings even further.” The basketball at Duke was pretty terrific, too, she said, adding that she remains a huge Blue Devils fan to this day.

Melissa Fitzpatrick: Superbly Qualified

Melissa Fitzpatrick is a veteran healthcare professional who has held a wide range of nursing and healthcare leadership roles over a career that has lasted more than thirty years so far. She holds a Master’s degree in nursing from the University of Pennsylvania and did her undergraduate work at Gwynedd-Mercy College.

She spent twelve years at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in New…

Melissa Fitzpatrick is a Registered Nurse with decades of clinical and executive experience. A graduate of Gwynedd-Mercy College and the University of Pennsylvania, she has been a mentor and role model to countless young nurses around the world, a sought-after motivational speaker and a consultant to hundreds of healthcare leaders and teams.

She says that when she began her career at the age of nineteen, she never dreamed it would take her to the places it has. “As a nurse, I have traveled the world, made lifelong friends and made a difference in the lives of patients, families, and colleagues,” she says.

Melissa Fitzpatrick is a registered nurse in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, who has decades of clinical and executive experience and domain expertise. The first-ever Chief Clinical Officer at Hill-Rom, she is a passionate and dedicated health practitioner and a thought leader in her profession.

She attended Gwynedd-Mercy College in Pennsylvania, where she earned her ADN and BSN, and the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned her MSN. She has been a Registered Nurse since 1977 and has built a national and international reputation as a consultant, speaker, and author. Her peer-reviewed writing has appeared in numerous publications and books.

In an article published in 2014, she described a growing issue in nursing: manual patient mobilization. Patient mobilization – physically moving patients so they are not impacted by prolonged inactivity – is major safety issue for nurses. . “There’s no such thing as ‘safe lifting’ when we use our bodies as the lifting mechanism,” Melissa Fitzpatrick wrote. “Old-school teachings about safe body mechanics have been proven invalid and many of us must unlearn them.” Too often, nurses have hurt themselves during manual patient handling; in some cases, the injuries have been career-ending and the costs associated with workers’ compensation are astronomical. Lawmakers proposed Safe Patient Handling and Mobility laws, supported by the American Nurses Association. “However,” she wrote, “only eleven states have enacted SPHM laws and these laws vary significantly. Much more work needs to be done.”