Sparking Interest in the Nursing Profession (Podcast)

The ongoing demand for more nurses is well-known throughout healthcare. But before we can welcome nurses into the profession, we must capture the hearts and minds of those who are curious about nursing. The Cleveland Clinic Center for Nursing Career Exploration (CNCE) aims to do just that.

Launched in August 2024, the center offers programming for everyone from school-aged students to adults, aiming to build a nursing pipeline by providing an inside look at the career.

“We are really working on changing the face of nursing,” says Linda Gardner, DNP, MEd, RN, CNOR, Senior Director of Nursing Education and Professional Development at Cleveland Clinic. “We all know that we are caring. You have to have that warm heart and want to take care of people. But you also have to be a critical thinker, and you have to be innovative.”

In this episode of Cleveland Clinic’s Nurse Essentials podcast, Gardner discusses CNCE programming and the nursing pipeline. She covers:

• Educational opportunities, including nurse shadowing, high school nursing assistant internships, the Launchpad to Nursing Boot Camp and more
• How to build meaningful connections with children in fifth grade and younger
• Important skills for nurses
• The CNCE’s approach to helping adults find a pathway to nursing
• Ways for nurses to connect with their community and spread the word about the profession

Click the podcast player above to listen to the episode now, or read on for a short, edited excerpt. Check out more Nurse Essentials episodes at my.clevelandclinic.org/podcasts/nurse-essentials or wherever you get your podcasts.

Podcast excerpt

Podcast host Carol Pehotsky, DNP, RN, NEA-BC: We have listeners that aren't from Cleveland Clinic that are inspired … and want to be part of the solution for my community, for my friends and neighbors for the community surrounding my hospital. What advice would you give to them?

Gardner: Start small. Don't bite off more than you could chew. Even just starting and having those opportunities to have those conversations. You know, if you are a part of your PTA at your school, or if you have connections where you can just send bits of information out about nursing or within your space, right?

If you are a nurse on your unit and you are passionate about nursing and you could spread a little bit of that information to your caregivers and ask everyone to send a nugget of that to their kids' school, you are starting to spread the pipeline. Go and find out from your hospitals, do we even do shadowing? There are so many people that didn't realize that their hospitals provide shadowing opportunities. So many people come up to me and they're like, “I didn't know you could shadow here.” And I'm like, “Yes, there are opportunities.” So, there are probably opportunities within your hospital. And shadowing costs no money. It just costs time to be able to make those connections.

So, I would start small, see what opportunities are already within the hospital, dig up a policy that says, yep, you can shadow, find out what those requirements are and start small.