February '07 - Shirley Bristow

ARN Southeast Texas Chapter

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Member Spotlight

Shirley Bristow, MSN, RN, CRRN

Current Employment: Specialty Wound and Ostomy Nurses, Inc.

Position: Field Nurse & Case Manager

Care for patients needing specialized wound care and/or ostomy care. Typically, the wounds are the more difficult to treat due to size, cause, treatment or anatomical location. The patients with an ostomy are usually fresh from surgery and often were not prepared prior to surgery as to what an ostomy means and how it will impact their life. Their primary need is training and proper product selection. Even though the patient may get as much as a week in the hospital, the first few days they are too sick for the training to be effective and most staff nurses don’t really have the time to do it in the course of their shift.

ARN Member Since: 1998

SETX Chapter ARN Member Since: 1998

SETX Chapter ARN Involvement: -Education Committee: Workshop & Expo
-Scholarship Committee
-Research Committee (briefly)
-Program Committee (just joined)
-Appointed Board Member: completed term for a 2 year -Board member
-Elected Board Member: 2 year term 2002-2004
-President: 2004-2005
-Past President: 2005-2006

Why did you decide to join SETX Chapter ARN?

“I was encouraged to join by many colleagues (Betty Clark & Sandy Steigerwald, especially) when I worked at TIRR, but the real clincher was when my professor, Dr. Mary Joe White, suggested I needed to join because I was defining myself as a rehabilitation nurse in all of my written assignments. That turned out to be very good advice.”

National ARN Involvement: -Poster presentation at National Conference, 2004
-Education Special Interest Group (SIG)
-Pain SIG
-CE Review Panel
-Appointed to review minutes of Annual Business -Meeting for two years

Awards Received:

1995: Who’s Who among American Junior Colleges
2001: SETX ARN Rehabilitation Nurse of the Year: Clinical
2005-2006: Manchester’s Who’s Who among Executives and Professionals
2006-2007: Empire’s Who’s Who among Executives, Professionals and Entrepreneurs

Community Involvement: -Member: Resurrection Metropolitan Community Church
-Serve on Audio-Visual Team
-Board Member: Lesbian Health Initiative (LHI) – Houston
-Team Nurse: Texas Shooting Stars: championship disabled rifle-shooting team
-Member: Texas Paralyzed Veterans

Exceptional Accomplishment:

“When Hurricane Andrew was bouncing around the Gulf (August, 1992), we decided it was a bad time to bring a trailer to Galveston, where I was scheduled to start my prerequisite courses for nursing school. After the danger passed, my friends weren’t available to move the trailer until the first weekend of October. So, when school started, I spent the first 6-weeks living in a tent. Not bad for someone who was 40 years of age at the time. Just like rehabilitation nursing, you work with what you have available and I did!”

Hobbies, Special Interests:

• All kinds of crafts (which I don’t get much chance to do)
• Helping others get the health care they need like the LHI health fairs to give that population access to mammograms and well-women exams.
• Sporting events for disabled athletes (attend as many as I can)

Previous Experience, especially as relates to your becoming/practice as a rehabilitation nurse:

• Girl Scouts: Junior level -- helped exercise a child with Cerebral Palsy
• Girl Scouts: Senior level – every Friday night recreation with young adults with MR, eventually led to 2-week camping trip every summer. My brothers continued the tradition for over ten years of family service.
• US Army WAC, Medic, & PT Tech working with soldiers injured in Viet Nam (1970-1971), mostly amputees and brain injured individuals. Stationed at Ft. Sam Houston, San Antonio, where I fell in love with Texas

What does Rehabilitation Nursing means to me: Coming Home

Shirley writes, “As I have grown with my practice, rehabilitation nursing has helped me understand my place in nursing. I use my certification as a way of explaining my level of expertise to patients. It seems the patients are not exposed to many of us because they come home from acute care without a stay on a rehabilitation unit. The Certified Rehabilitation Registered Nurse designation has actually impressed patients more than my Master’s degree!

I get to help patients plan the next step in their recovery process. For some, it is just a matter of learning the psychomotor skills of managing their ostomy appliance, which sounds much simpler than it is for the uninitiated. For others, it is continuing the healing process begun in the hospital with a wound that used to require continued hospitalization. The wound vacuum assisted closure technology is now available in the home setting and allows people to at least convalesce at home. Remember, “There’s no place like home, Auntie Em.”? It’s still true today, friends.

The homecare patients are more relaxed and willing to discuss their real needs, which they don’t realize until they get home. Whether those needs are how to get through the bathroom door with a walker that’s wider than the door, or more personal relations difficulties, it is less embarrassing for the patient to ask on his own home turf. So, rehabilitation nursing is still about “coming home” to me.”
And on a final note….

“Most of us really enjoy the opportunity to teach patients how to care for themselves. I’d like to challenge my colleagues to take that need to foster independence in our patients and help a nurse new to rehabilitation gain the skills and confidence to identify himself or herself as a rehabilitation nurse. Eventually, we’ll be on the receiving end and I’d like to think those nurses were mentored by the best!

I think I gained more professional growth once I became involved with SETX ARN. There were things I didn’t know I needed to know that I learned along the way in working to make SETX ARN the best chapter in ARN. Growth is an active process, so you have to be active to grow. What one learns in school is rapidly changed due to evidence based practices and continued research. There’s room for everyone to be involved, seriously involved; no one has to sit on the sidelines.”

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