SPOTLIGHT ON:
Marisa Streelman By Matt Skoufalos
arisa Streelman had considered a career in medicine long before a health careers program at her Flint, Michigan high school offered her the opportunity to preview a handful of hospital jobs prior to college. Although Streelman initially had planned to become a physician, after having been exposed to the work of nursing teams at the hospital, she noticed how much more patient interaction nurses experienced than physicians did — and that was the work with which she felt most connected. It was then that Streelman realized she’d be better off studying nursing.
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“My calling was really around helping the patients, so I flipped my mind around,” Streelman said. After completing her BSN at Eastern Michigan, Streelman began her nursing career at an oncology unit at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in downtown Chicago, Illinois. From delivering palliative care and symptom management, she learned a lot about what patients experience when the internal functions of their bodies are disrupted by cancer. She continued to work as a charge nurse for several years until she began feeling an itch to do something else. “I’m a person who looks for challenges and opportunities,” Streelman said. “I had a great mentor, and she said, ‘Why don’t you look at management?’ I ended up loving it, and I stayed in nursing leadership for about 13 years.” Streelman spent three of those 13 years at Northwestern Memorial before moving on to a cardiac step-down unit at University of Colorado Hospital for two years. Afterward, she headed back to Chicago to manage a general medicine unit at Rush University Medical Center for seven years. During that time, Streelman followed up the master’s degree in nursing administration she’d earned from the University
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OR TODAY | May 2022
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