Shenita Summers

Shenita Summers, LVN

at St. Joseph Health

JENNY TWITCHELL Special to The Eagle

For the past 40 years, Shenita Summers, LVN, has devoted her life to nursing, and she has never looked back.

“As far as what I do, I love what I do,” she said. “I’m a very conscientious nurse. When I go home at night, I want to feel good about what I’ve accomplished or what I’ve done through the day. I ask myself, ‘Did I do everything I could have done for my patients today? I want to go home every night and I know I can sleep because I know that for me, I have done the best job that I know how to do.”

Summers works at CHI St. Joseph Health Regional Hospital as a medicine surgical trauma nurse where she helps patients who are dealing with any type of trauma except for heart trauma, she said. She has worked at St. Joseph for 22 years, but also worked in home health, long term care, a crisis unit, an OBGYN department – all different kinds of nursing, she said.

Her passion for nursing started when she was in high school and participated in a program called the Health Occupation Students of America – through which she started working at a nursing home when she was 15.

“I went to school half a day and worked half a day, and I’ve been doing it ever since,” she said. It’s all I’ve known - being a caregiver, taking care of people, and I’ve enjoyed every step of it, every moment of it, and I still enjoy it.”

Being a nurse isn’t always glamorous and it’s not always easy, Summers said. As a seasoned nurse, she offers advice to new nurses about the lessthan alluring side of nursing.

“Please don’t let money be the motivation,” she said. “I tell the nurses that all the time now, because financial needs are high, but I hate to see nurses go to school for the money and don’t have the compassion required to do it because nursing is not this glorified position that sometimes people think of it as. There’s some downright dirty stuff that goes with it.”

One thing that both patients and fellow nurses appreciate about Summers is that she doesn’t beat around the bush, but she is stern in an endearing way, said Laura Tarver, BSN, RN-BC, nurse manager at St. Joseph. For example, if surgical patients who need to get up and walk around after surgery (because it’s vital for their recovery) are refusing to do so, Summers is the one to call.

“She is very good at making the patients understand why it’s important and getting them to do it in a way that doesn’t upset them,” Tarver said. “She has a way in making them understand and participate, and they still love her at the end of the shift. She’s no nonsense. She comes in and says, ‘This is our plan for the day,’ and she spells everything out for them: this is what is going to happen and when it’s going to happen, so she’s very good at that.”

She’s also very dedicated to educating her patients and keeping them informed, Tarver said.

“She really educates her patients on what is wrong with them and educates them on what they need to do when they get home,” Tarver said. “She educates them on the new disease process if they’ve been diagnosed with something new or whatever injury they had. She’s very detailed and particular about that.”

Also, while patients are in the hospital, Summers keeps them informed by updating the whiteboard in their rooms with every detail, including who is taking care of them, what the goals are, and what the schedule entails.

“She’s very detailed with all that – that whiteboard is full when she is working,” Tarver said.

Writing things down is within Summers’s comfort zone, but the way computers have become such an integral part of nursing is something Summers said she would have never expected.

“If you were to ask me even 10 to 15 years ago if I thought nursing would ever be taken over by computers, I’d say no way, but let me tell you something, we cannot do our jobs without a computer in front of us,” Summers said.

Despite the changes she’s seen in nursing, it hasn’t kept her from trying to be the best nurse possible.

“We are the eyes, the ears, everything for these patients sometimes,” she said. “Sometimes you just have to be a good listener to be a good nurse, sometimes you need to meet a physical need or an emotional need, or a medical need, so there’s no one way to be a good nurse.”