Chaudron Carter Short tackles dual leadership appointment at Temple University and Temple Health

Chaudron Carter Short’s mother worked in health care in Philadelphia, and as a young girl, she went to work with her sometimes. So it was almost as if nursing were part of her DNA.

Still, when she went to college, she planned to study pharmacology. But then she switched. She became a nurse. “It became a love,” she says.

Now, after 20-plus years as a nurse and a string of degrees, including two master’s degrees and two doctorates, she’s taking on a new challenge: a dual leadership appointment at Temple University and Temple Health.

Carter Short now chairs the Department of Nursing, as a professor of nursing at Temple’s College of Public Health, and she is senior vice president and associate chief nursing officer for Temple Health.

We asked her a few questions about her work and the state of nursing.

“Nursing is one of the hardest bachelor’s degrees to obtain. It is well-documented that when you are marginalized, you feel additional pressures.”

Staffing is one of the biggest. I say that because during the pandemic, most organizations needed to staff for the pandemic, in addition to their regular hospital needs, and as a result there was a surge in using agency recruitment firms. These firms were paying triple to quadruple the normal salaries.

This essentially drove up costs. If a regular RN [registered nurse] leaves your organization to work for an agency, you often had to ask an agency recruitment firm to find you a replacement — at a higher cost. Through the pandemic, and even now, we continue to see the number of agency usage rise, which decreases the permanent staff an organization has. We are seeing this across the country, which is the trickle-down effect of the pandemic.

We saw that during the pandemic, nurses retired. They went to different industries. There’s a large body of evidence that suggests staffing shortages affect working conditions, such as burnout, stress, staff satisfaction, and overall patient outcome.

Another challenge is workplace violence. This includes physical assault and threats, which can come from patients, family members, and other staff members. For instance, a patient may become frustrated by something said or done and take it out on the health-care worker by physically hitting, throwing items, or making verbal assaults.

This is becoming more prevalent since the pandemic. Sometimes, this can involve serious physical harm. There have been instances across the country of people entering health-care organizations with weapons, looking to really hurt people. It’s unprecedented. It seems like everyone is on edge.

The biggest change was the pandemic and how we had to navigate the response to the disease. As a new disease, there were many unknowns. There was no blueprint to help us understand the ramifications of the disease and how it would impact our staff — everyone from nurses to physicians and dietary and housekeeping.

But it taught us a lot. It made those in the nursing department have to depend more on each other. For everything. To see this extraordinary teamwork in action was the difference. I think it gave people new pride in their profession. At Temple, our staff said, “We want to take care of our COVID patients. We don’t want agency nurses taking care of them.” It was amazing. They took ownership over the COVID patients.

The simple answer is yes. There is a lack of diversity in nursing and nursing leadership. I believe it is rooted in the lack of diversity in universities that provide nursing education. When faculty members don’t look like you, it can be difficult. Having a lack of diversity puts up barriers and impacts student success. Some students experience discrimination, racism, microaggressions, and a general lack of being included.

Nursing is one of the hardest bachelor’s degrees to obtain. It is well-documented that when you are marginalized, you feel additional pressures. I’ve seen many minority students say, “Nursing is not for me,” which may be due to an inadequate support system at home or school.

But if we don’t begin to look at attracting and retaining nurses of color, it will be difficult for us to meet the current priorities globally and demonstrate linkages among patient outcomes, and quality and safety.

When I was a clinical nurse, I had a minority patient who would tell me about his family and what they ate for dinner. I started to understand why he was coming in with swelling. It was the meats in their vegetables and additives in their food. If a Caucasian nurse had heard this, it might not have rung any bells. But I understood the complexities of this type of diet. It was an “aha” moment for me and my physician colleagues.

When we don’t have patients being cared for by people who look like them, they might not provide you with the information you need. There is still fear and distrust among the African American community and health care institutions.

Temple Health and Temple University are in a unique position to begin to invade implicit bias in the nursing curriculum by having and seeing favorable interactions with African American faculty and nursing staff. Creating an inclusive and safe learning environment decreases stereotypes and provides real life situations.

It starts with being able to have dialogue, to speak openly about differences instead of seeing them as a barrier. It might even be about hair, about types of foods of different cultures, something so simple. But if you don’t have that dialog in a safe space for inclusion and diversity and equity, you can’t get to the next level. You can’t change a curriculum if you don’t have the foundation.

It is the teamwork, the collaboration, and the communication that must take place to provide exceptional care for patients. This may seem like a little thing, but it is huge. Taking care of patients in today’s society is not easy. The typical patient doesn’t come in with just one ailment. They have multiple ailments. To provide exceptional care for patients, we all need to be on the same team.

Through my tenure as a nurse and a nurse leader, I’ve learned that anything that goes wrong always comes back to one of those three things: teamwork, collaboration, or communication. And anything that goes right comes back to those three things.