Spotlight On: Terry Jones

SPOTLIGHT ON:

Terry Jones, Ph.D. RN

By matt skoufalos

For a seasoned nurse educator with several advanced degrees, Terry Jones doesn’t seem to remember the exact moment when she decided to pursue a career in nursing.

“It always seemed to be something that I wanted to do,” Jones said; “a bit of a calling, perhaps. It was something I was drawn to even before I understood what it fully entailed: the desire to be helpful, especially in those moments when people are struggling with health issues.”

Jones began her nursing career in the 1980s, attending nursing school at Marycrest College, the only baccalaureate program in Davenport, Iowa at the time. While attending nursing school, she availed herself of the opportunity to work as a nurse’s aide, which offered her work experience throughout the hospital in a variety of different areas.

That’s when Jones discovered her interest in critical care nursing; however, the specialty was just coming into its own at that point, and new graduates weren’t often permitted to work in critical care areas. So after graduation, when the time came for Jones to find a permanent position, she searched farther from home.

Finally, Jones landed on the Parkland Health and Hospital System in Dallas, Texas, which offered an internship curriculum for baccalaureate graduates who wanted to work in the critical care area. For a Midwesterner who’d never encountered the idea of a safety net hospital in Iowa, Jones confessed to experiencing “quite the culture shock, but in a good way.”

“I was drawn to it; drawn to the amount of need there was in that environment, and really learning what nursing was in that environment,” she said. “And I stayed in that organization for 22 years because there were so many opportunities for growth.”

Those opportunities expanded Jones’ understanding of the world of nursing, as she embraced the variety of options available to her in the field. Over the course of her time at Parkland, she worked in the ICU as a bedside nurse, and later took on roles in nursing education, management and research.

“We were one of the first hospitals helping graduate nurses to get into the OR through a residency,” Jones recalled. “Then I served in an administrative capacity over research, quality improvement, care coordination, and ended my stint there as the interim chief nursing officer. I really experienced health care through a variety of different lenses. I was always fascinated.”

While working at Parkland,

Jones also earned a master’s degree in nursing education from Texas Woman’s University and a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. She completed a second master’s degree in clinical science from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, and was recruited to work at the University of Texas at Austin as she decided to transition from bedside nursing work to nursing education. Since 2010, she’s worked full-time in academia. Today Jones is a tenured associate professor at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Nursing in the Department of Adult Health Nursing and Nursing Systems.

“I loved my season at the bedside,” Jones said; “those are still some of my fondest memories of working directly with patients. There’s nothing better than being with patients and having that direct reinforcement of what you’re doing; the immediate gratification of knowing that you helped someone.”

“I loved feeling like I made a difference in my patients’ lives,” she said. “Now I serve patients indirectly by educating nurse managers, which was always appealing to me because I want every patient to have really good nursing care. To help other people learn to do that well is really important. Wherever I am, the patient is; if I have a seat at the boardroom, then I bring the patient with me.”

Jones also leverages the experience she’s cultivated throughout her decades in the field of nursing in the classroom environment. For as much as things have changed since she entered her career, Jones pointed out that “the human interaction between nurse and patient is very much the same.”

“People still experience pain,” she said. “That space where we enter with them into their suffering, and try to help and support them, and have empathy — those needs are the same. How we do that, and how much time we have to do all that is different, but the basic nursing need for care in the midst of suffering, I think that’s the same.”

“Currently, the health care system is more complex today than it’s ever been,” she said. “We have much more technology available. The immediate care environment is much different, the acuity of care is different, the length of stay is much shorter. We’ve tried to push so much care outside of the hospital. The amount of time for us to do teaching in the hospital is less and less, and it’s harder to teach patients when they’re acutely ill.”

To Jones, those changes are also underscored by the emergence of a much larger team of specialized health care workers, including discharge nurses, health coordinators and patient navigators. Today’s nurses interact with more people to get the job done, use more technology over a shorter period of time, and treat patients who are in many ways more educated than they’ve been, she said. To her, that’s reason enough for professionals in the nursing field to embrace an attitude of lifelong learning.

“You have to keep learning because our world keeps changing,” Jones said. “We have new technology, and treatment modalities, and ways of thinking. If you want to be as helpful as you can, you have to keep learning. When you do that, it’s been my experience that good things happen.”

As a veteran nurse and educator, Jones is still frequently contacted for advice from colleagues as well as prior students; by the time she left Parkland, she noted, “many of the administrators there were people that I hired.”

“Now after all these years having been faculty, many students will continue to reach out,” Jones said. “It’s nice to be able to help build the next generation, and to share lessons learned so they can benefit from my experiences.”

“Sometimes all they need is to talk to someone else who understands and lets them process out loud, and make connections when people are ready to move,” she said. “That’s one of the reasons I love teaching right now: to be able to help someone else not have to struggle in the same way that I struggled, to pay it forward.”

When she’s not working, Jones loves spending time in her garden, and is very active within her church. Her interests include reading, music and traveling. She has been a frequent participant in nursing associations, from the Texas Nurses Association and the Texas Organization of Nurse Executives to the Academy of Medical Surgical Nurses. She was inducted as a fellow in the American Academy of Nursing in October 2022.

“I loved feeling like I made a difference in my patients’ lives.”