Supporting Nurses: A Talk With Stacey A. Conklin, MSN, RN-BC, MHCDS, NE-BC, Senior Vice President and Chief Nursing Officer, Mount Sinai South Nassau
Stacey A. Conklin, MSN, RN-BC, MHCDS, NE-BC
Each year, Gallup surveys the public opinion of various professions in terms of honesty and ethics. For 21 consecutive years, nurses have come out on top. Nurses are trusted because of their integrity, advocacy, empathy, and compassion. They do whatever it takes to make a difference in the life of another. The work is very rewarding but also fast-paced and demanding, making it critically important for nurses to focus on their personal well-being as well.
“Nurses are dedicated to delivering the best and safest possible care to our patients,” says Stacey Conklin, MSN, RN-BC, MHCDS, NE-BC, Senior Vice President and Chief Nursing Officer (CNO) at Mount Sinai South Nassau. “To deliver this level of care, we have to fully support them, both professionally and as whole people. I see this as one of my top responsibilities as CNO.”
Ms. Conklin, her colleagues, and her leadership team have been conducting focus groups, doing leadership rounds, and working strenuously to better understand the needs of nurses. “My focus is on identifying the most important priorities, bringing these back to our senior leadership team, and fiercely advocating for them,” she says.
As part of this work, they are exploring emerging generational differences in the workforce. “For a new nurse, the workplace can be overwhelming at times,” she says. “There’s so much to learn. Yet, those of us who have been nurses for many years can learn some important work-life balance lessons from them.”
Historically, nurses have been known for doing whatever it takes to care for patients and their loved ones, at times to their own detriment. Ms. Conklin senses a subtle shift emerging within nursing, one that has the potential to shape the future of the profession. “As a newer generation of nurses is coming along, it’s clear they’re highly dedicated to their patients,” she says. “But they also understand better than we did that they can only give their patients their best when they are at their best.”
Creating Excellence Together
To this end, Ms. Conklin and her team have been especially focused on supporting the nursing staff in career advancement and by reducing workload.
Career Paths
“The nurses want to know they have a good career path, so we want to work with them to set goals and advance professionally,” she says. “For example, the hospital is currently expanding to add 40 critical care beds and nine operating rooms and launching a cardiac surgery program in 2025. This is an amazing opportunity for staff as they grow and get grounded. If and when they want to go into cardiac surgery, the opportunity is going to be right here.”
The hospital also offers a robust clinical ladder that gives nurses an opportunity to validate their level of expertise and be compensated accordingly. Nurses can apply to participate in a five-level system that works on a point basis. Staff earn points for different aspects of their practice, including patient experience, exemplary practice, community service, research, and others. As they progress, the requirements change to reflect a higher expected level of professional experience and expertise.
Ms. Conklin is also trying to establish pathways to leadership for millennial nurses. “There’s been an unofficial rule in nursing that you have to pay your dues before you can become a leader,” she says. “I’d like us to think differently about fostering young nurses to go into leadership roles and tap into their unique talents earlier in their careers. We have already begun to do this with the nursing leadership team and everyone is benefitting from the connections with staff and leaders.”
Workload Reduction
Another priority involves reducing the workload of nurses. Ms. Conklin and her team are applying evidence-based models of care to remove tasks that can be time-consuming. “Being innovative is really important to me,” she says, “And that includes listening to the ideas the nurses have and looking to technology as a way to ease their burden and enhance practice.”
“The introduction of the virtual nurse on the Medical-Surgical and Telemetry units is a great example,” says Ms. Conklin. Virtual nursing involves incorporating the support of an experienced nurse into the care of a patient via a real-time telehealth or virtual connection. “The virtual nurse can conduct the majority of an admission or provide a second set of eyes for a skin check, something we would otherwise have to pull another nurse away from the bedside to do. We’re encouraging nurses to identify and delegate other tasks these virtual nurses can perform,” she says. “Like patient education, where they are spending time with the patient, and the patient is reassured that they always have someone there for them.”
Mount Sinai South Nassau is using software to assess patient acuity that accounts for not only how sick the patient is, but for the amount of time it takes to provide care. “The patient is here because they require care, but for Patient A that care may not be as time-consuming as the care necessary for Patient B,” says Ms. Conklin. “Patient B may be admitted for something minor, but their care is time-intensive. We want to understand both the complexity and intensity of the care required, so that we can staff the unit appropriately and objectively. This allows us to tailor the staffing to meet the actual needs of the patients.”
“We also want to help nurses better balance their time at work and at home, and we can do this by thinking differently about scheduling,” says Ms. Conklin. “For example, the nurses on the Behavioral Health Unit wanted to go to 10-hour shifts versus eight-hour shifts. I was all for it, and they proposed a schedule with two shifts going to 10 hours, and the overnight shift staying at eight hours. The nurses who opted for the 10-hour shifts would work only four days a week versus five. Everybody was happy, it worked, and we implemented the change at no cost to the organization. It was a huge win for the staff because they created more work-life balance.”
Pathway to Leadership
“I started school as a married mother of one and pregnant with another,” says Ms. Conklin. “Entering my career a little bit later gave me a very different perspective, and once I started my clinical experiences I never looked back.”
Initially on staff at NYU Langone Medical Center, Ms. Conklin ascended to the role of Assistant Nurse Manager. There, she helped launch a new electronic medical record, learning a lot about the topic before it was even a field. She then accepted a position in nursing education at another hospital, helping to roll out their electronic medical record in tandem with a shared governance council to better engage staff in the work. Later, she took her talents to a systemwide information technology position, all while working on her Master of Science in Health Care Delivery at Dartmouth College.
“I learned a lot about technology, workflow, and hospital operations and was able to use my clinical knowledge to really enhance workflows across the organization,” says Ms. Conklin. “But, I was feeling very disconnected from patient care. I wanted to go back into nursing and become a CNO, and I was fortunate to have a great mentor who helped me do just that. And, as a CNO at the height of the pandemic, when we had to open virtual units, my IT background became instrumental in helping operationalize units and technology in non-traditional patient care areas.”
Ms. Conklin has more than 20 years of experience in nursing administration and patient care. She was Director of Patient Care Services at Mount Sinai Beth Israel and Chief Information Officer at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, New York. She later served as Senior Director of Patient Care Services at New York Eye and Ear Infirmary of Mount Sinai before being named Vice President of Patient Care Services and Chief Nursing Officer there. Today, Ms. Conklin oversees all nursing activities at Mount Sinai South Nassau, and the more than 900 registered nurses who ensure the delivery of consistent high-quality care to their community. A testimony to the hospital’s Nursing Service, the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC) recently designated Mount Sinai South Nassau a Magnet hospital for the third time, the highest available recognition of excellence in nursing care.
Ms. Conklin served as an adjunct professor of Graduate Nursing at Molloy College, where she received her Bachelor of Science in Nursing. She earned her Master of Science in Nursing from Walden University in Baltimore, and her Master of Science in Health Care Delivery from Dartmouth College. Ms. Conklin is board certified by the ANCC in both Nursing Informatics and as a Nurse Executive. She is a member of the American Nurses Association and a Fellow of The New York Academy of Medicine.
