CAREERS IN NURSING
QUALITIES OF A GREAT NURSE – RANCHWOOD NURSING CENTER
by Marsha Callahan LPN/Corporate Nurse Consultant
There are many Nurses in this world, it’s a profession that is needed and will always be needed. They care about their patients and they strive to and do provide good care.
They chose the Nursing field because it offers job security in a world of uncertainty. There is nothing wrong with choosing a job that you feel secure in, a job that there will always be a need for, and that pays well. These Nurses are good at their jobs and I’m thankful they have chosen to go into this field. I want to write about those Nurses that have a calling for this line of work. To them it’s not just a job, it’s a fulfillment. They have the desire to ease the pain and suffering of others, to bring a smile to the face of the depressed and help lift their spirits. To be the one that makes a difference in someone’s life by being there for them when no one else is around. These Nurses are there to listen to their patients fears, they hold their hand and pray with them as they take their last breath. They are the Nurse that is always there to listen to the families concerns, not run the other way when they see them approaching. They don’t always leave the job behind when they clock out, they find themselves thinking about their patients at home, and wondering what else they could have done to help them.
One such Nurse that I have had the privilege of working with is Leslie Wafer. Presently she is working as the Director of Nursing at Ranchwood Nursing Center in Yukon. She oversees Nursing at a 150 bed facility that has a 5 star rating by the Federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Leslie began her career in Nursing by getting her CNA license while still in high school. She worked at Ranchwood as a CNA and then obtained her CMA. She states that it was her parents that encouraged her to continue on in her career and in 2004 she received her LPN license. She married Rob Wafer in 2005, then started RN school which she completed and graduated in December of 2006. She briefly worked as DON at Tuscany Village in 2009 before “coming back home” to be DON at Ranchwood Nursing Center. She attributes a lot of what she has learned about being a good Nurse from her company’s Corporate Nurse, Tamara Meadows.
She has a very busy life being a wife and mother and juggling the schedules that come with raising three active boys, Kohen 9, Braxton 5 and Easton 4. As DON of a large facility she is on call all the time, and at times comes to the facility in the middle of the night, just to ensure the staff are doing their job. She takes pride in her job and strives on a daily basis to make her facility a Home, not just a dwelling place for the patients. She takes any complaints to heart and makes it a priority to resolve them. She is truly a living example of what Nursing is all about.
