The Sim Cafe~

The Sim Cafe~ An interview with Stephanie Benfield BSN, RN, CCRN

November 20, 2022 Deb Season 3 Episode 7
The Sim Cafe~
The Sim Cafe~ An interview with Stephanie Benfield BSN, RN, CCRN
Show Notes Transcript

Stephanie is a critical care nurse and has been practicing for the past 10 years at numerous hospitals including; Hinsdale, Memorial in South Bend, IN, Good Samaritan, Alexian Brothers, and is currently working at Stroger/Cook County Hospital in Chicago, IL. She is certified in CPR, ACLS, NIHSS, ATCN, and CCRN.  Stephanie focuses on patient centered and family-centered care. As an ICU nurse, Stephanie has managed a diverse patient population including trauma, violent trauma, burns, neurosurgical, post-cardiothoracic surgery, stroke, post-surgical, post-arrest, and most recently acutely ill COVID-19 patients.   

Stephanie has a bachlors degree in Biology from DePaul University and a bachlors degree in Nursing from Chamberlain University.


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Intro:

Welcome to The Sim Cafe, a podcast produced by the team at Innovative SimSolutions, edited by Shelly Houser. Join our host, Deb Tauber as she sits down with subject matter experts from across the globe to reimagine clinical education and the use of simulation. So pour yourself a cup of relaxation, sit back, tune in, and learn something new from The Sim Cafe.

Deb:

Welcome to another episode of The Sim Cafe. Thank you for joining us and this is a Thanksgiving special. So we've got a very special guest and what are you thankful for? And I'm thankful for all of our guests as well as all of our listeners. I'm thankful for my friends and I'm most very thankful for my family. So today I have the honor of interviewing Stephanie Benfield, my daughter. And Stephanie is a third generation nurse. My aunts we're both nurses. One of'em is still alive in 10 and she always modeled the soul of a great nurse. And my Aunt Pat, who is no longer with us, and she was wonderful and she was an emergency room nurse. So thank you Stephanie for joining us and welcome to The Sim Cafe.

Stephanie:

Thanks mom. I was gonna say, you could call me Deb or you can call me mom<laugh>. What would you prefer? I call you

Deb:

Whatever you want. Whatever you're comfortable. All right, thanks Steph. Um, so Steph, when did you decide that you wanted to become a nurse?

Stephanie:

Well, initially I chose to pursue a route in business like my father after observing both my parents at home and and their work attire and their work attitudes. The business route definitely seemed more appealing to me. Then I went to business school, DePaul University and halfway through I had gotten a position as an intern at a firm. My dad had set up for me and just realized it wasn't a good fit for me. The tech system and which was part of the internship program, was not based in science. It had a lot to do with money, which is what I thought I had wanted. But ultimately I'm a very caring, nurturing person and decided to go something more science based and didn't know at that point I was gonna end up in nursing. And once I got that degree in biology I for nursing school, that was like an accelerated program. And kind of

Deb:

You were drawn, were you drawn to it?

Stephanie:

Well, it was kind of like I was, I think nursing was always there for me and I kind of almost let it in finally and never looked back. It's been a wonderful career. I've learned a lot. I've grown a lot. I've gotten to help hundreds of people, which I have thousands probably that I, I don't know that I would've gotten that opportunity the same in a business field and it definitely has felt like a life worth living. Yeah. So that's how I ended up in nursing.

Deb:

Yes. And you are a very, very caring nurse. I can say that.

Stephanie:

Thank you.

Deb:

Um, my next question is what are y our, y our thoughts about simulation from nursing school? So you actually grew up, when we were doing simulation, you started with evidence b ased simulation activities to help you learn. And so what were your thoughts and feelings from school doing sim?

Stephanie:

Initially my first degree was in biology, so I did do a lot of hands on lab experience in chemistry and biology labs for school. When I got to nursing school and we started the simulation labs as part of the clinical rotation, I didn't know it was new to me. It was always part of what nursing school was cuz it was my only exposure to nursing school. But it was definitely cool to go from beakers and petri dishes to you know, human beings that could respond to you in actual like mock scenarios. It felt like a safe learning environment. All the other students had never been in it either. So there was definitely a degree of comfort in the discomfort and I really enjoyed my time in simulation. Plus I had a really cool teacher, which was you<laugh>.

Deb:

Thanks. So that helps with the comfort level probably.Well, and I don't think the listeners know this about, about us. Uh, Stephanie went to Chamberlain University, which is now Chamberlain University and I was working in a, an assisted living nursing facility and she said to me, Hey mom, this school feels different. And I went ahead and applied and got the job at Chamberlain in the simulation lab and that's where I got started. So we were both new together.

Stephanie:

Mm-hmm<affirmative>. Yeah.

Deb:

Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Can you share with our guests how you used simulation at Memorial Hospital? Because when you got there you were in a unique position.

Stephanie:

Yes. So Memorial Hospital was based of South Bend, Indiana. It was uh, one of a couple hospitals in the area. They saw a lot of trauma, unique trauma like factory trauma, farming trauma, then kind of open country living trauma along with all the other types of intensive care things they offer. But I started there as a new nurse. I became somebody who preset it, then I started doing charge nurse. I ended up being a full-time charge. I was part of their education committee and their unit practice council. So I got to do a lot of different things to influence our practice. So one of the holes that we had found was in our Code Blue event recording, the education committee, including myself, decided to do a mock code video that the staff would sit down then and have to record the events. So that was probably one of the first mos of simulation that I partook in on the educational side. And I think everybody learned a lot from it. There was not the pressure of an actual code, but all the information that you needed during a code in the video. I mean it was really to highlight key portions of the code that people were forgetting. Like uh, airway confirmation uh, was one of the big ones. I remember RO time of RO and then how you write the dosing of the medications, things like that. But it was just an easy way for everybody to get to experience emergency recording without having to be in an actual emergency. And that was always one of my biggest passions was how can we improve this process that is something people experience being in a, being a code, being the patient of a code which is, you know, the sickest patient in the hospital at that time. And if we get to practice it over and over again, how can we make their outcome better because we're doing it over and over again. So we end up coming with like a up with a debrief form as well. But we can edit this part out.

Deb:

Steph, I'm gonna ask you too, because you were in the pandemic, I mean from the very beginning and you ended up to work at, well I think now it's like four different organizations. But why don't you start out about what it was like when you were at Memorial at the beginning of the pandemic and the stress levels that you guys felt then?

Stephanie:

When the pandemic first came out, it started over in China and so it was more of us listening and speculating. I remember nobody was wearing masks. People started wearing masks and that was being questioned. Everybody was really scared and nobody had been in this situation before, but everybody knew they were on the clock to figure out how they were going to manage this thing we didn't know anything about. So my first job when the pandemic erupted in the United States was really stressful, which it was for everybody. I was a full-time charge. So there were responsibilities of getting information from the leader, the leadership team above me who was waiting on information from the leadership team above them and putting it into practice. And then, you know, calmly telling the staff that this is what we were doing and everybody was really scared and things were ever changing and evolving and questions were constantly coming up and it ceased all visitation. Patients were scared, family members were scared. It was something I think none of us will ever forget. I remember a physician saying that he thought 10% of nurses would excel and take this pandemic as an opportunity to grow nursing. 10% would completely leave the field and then 80% would just carry on in the field. Which it's interesting to think about now because I think the number of people who want to get out of nursing now is a lot higher than just 10%. I think the duration it went on for and just the trauma of being with these people who are so sick and a lot of them you knew were gonna die when their families couldn't be there. It was really traumatic.

Deb:

Yeah, I remember we would talk about that, about how difficult it was because we're wired to, you know, have others among us during experiences such as end of life. And I think it was uh, even more difficult for you because your grandmother, my mother died too during the pandemic and we were not allowed to be too close to her. So I think it was a a difficult time.

Stephanie:

It was, it was very hard And yeah, it highlighted a lot of problems with nursing. I feel like somebody's touch base on this in one of your podcasts where things can't get much worse so we can start building up again. But the pandemic definitely highlighted a lot of areas where healthcare's struggling. One of the big ones I feel like I noticed was communication with family. At that point we were requiring a lot of initiation of phone calls from physicians to family members or from nurses as well to family members to keep them abreast of what was going on with their loved one. And that's where you really realize how seeing a loved one is so much different than from the communication you get over the phone about how they're doing. So in a lot of situations we'd have patients who were on the final stages of support we could give them and the message wasn't coming across to them that their loved one was literally on their deathbed because they couldn't come in and see them. And it was almost sometimes felt like too hard to convey that over the phone. It took too much time. Unfortunately a lot of patients suffered on ventilators, on their stomachs, swelling up with, you know, devices breaking down their skin because how do you say goodbye to somebody without getting to see them? So it was very stressful and sad and I think many times over the course of life there have been these moments where terrible things are happening to people and you grow and you learn from it, but it doesn't stop them from happening and I don't think this is any different.

Deb:

Right, right. Steph, what about when you went to the next hospitals? What were, what were things, what was different?

Stephanie:

The focus initially was on negative pressure isolation. So my first job we converted our PACU to a completely negative pressure area and the staff would be, have to be in there wearing packers all day, 12 hours gowned up. That was really hard. When I went to the next hospital, they had installed negative pressure airflow into rooms. So that was a little bit easier. I think there did start to become some confusion about who needed negative airflow and who didn't. And so things were never really consistent across any of the hospitals and their rules, which is just how healthcare is.

Deb:

Yeah, I would have to agree with that. And especially being in different parts of that. You were in Michigan or in Indiana and then you were in the state of Illinois. So things were a little bit different at those places. Uh, too.

Stephanie:

Correct. And once a place, once your facility decides to roll out how they're going to address this, you just grow from there. You don't start over cuz somebody else is doing something else. So it was interesting to see the evolution of each facility's process.

Deb:

Now Steph, is there anything that you'd like to share with our listeners or anything that you learned that you think would be important for people to know and remember from your pandemic experiences?

Stephanie:

That's not a big question at all.

Deb:

<laugh>.

Stephanie:

I think the biggest thing I can convey to people who are about to take on this career of taking care of patients for the first time, always remember that despite how many times you are going to see something in the course of your career, this is the only time that they're experiencing it. I think that's my best piece of advice to anybody who's still giving care. A lot of times you get stuck in this mindset of this type of patient, you know, comes with this or the family's like this. But if you always think back to this is their only mother or this is their only grandfather, I think it helps you remember how delicate the situation is for them and how important your role is in getting through this, whatever the outcome is going to be. Yeah, the pandemic's gonna wear you down, but nobody's more scared than the patient and their families. And if you're feeling like you need a break, then figure out how you can get a break because you can't take care of them if you're not taking care of yourself.

Deb:

Yeah, I think I, I remember talking to about that we talked about kinda setting a timer on your watch that would go off every hour to remind yourself to breathe just because it was so intense and have I, you know, do I need to get some water? Do I need to just breathe and take care of the situation?

Stephanie:

That's very true

Deb:

This has just been a great interview with you. I really appreciate your time. I appreciate what you do. I appreciate you taking on this role within the family and if any of our guests or listeners would wanna get ahold of you, where can they reach out?

Stephanie:

I'm on LinkedIn, so you could send me a message to there. My name's Stephanie Benfield and I'm sure Deb will connect my name to this podcast so you can, uh, find me via that.

Deb:

Thank you so much Stephanie and happy simulating.

Stephanie:

Thanks Deb. Love you.

Deb:

Love you.

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Outro:

Thanks for joining us here at The Sim Cafe. We hope you enjoyed connect with us at www.Innovativesimsolutions.com and be sure to hit that like and subscribe button so you never miss an episode of The Sim Cafe.