The Road Less Traveled

Heather Nelson-Brantley took a non-traditional path to her career as a member of the KU School of Nursing faculty.

Ellisa Monroe

When University of Kansas School of Nursing Clinical Instructor Heather Nelson-Brantley, Ph.D., RN, CCRN-K, finished reading Frans Johansson’s book

The Medici Effect earlier this year, she knew it would help guide the rest of her career. The best-selling book details how the most effective innovations often arise when there are teams of people from different disciplines, cultures, and educational backgrounds working together. Nelson-Brantley said the book reinforced her belief that interprofessional teams are critical for highly efficient, caring, and effective health care delivery and made the case that innovation can come from individual people who have that kind of diversity within them.

“This was an idea I had never even considered before, but it instantly resonated with me, because I am that individual,” said Nelson-Brantley. “It helped me embrace the varied path I’ve traveled.”

Nelson-Brantley’s nursing career journey began not with her first nursing class at KU, but stretches way back to a previous career, and in a way, to her very roots.

A Kansas native, Nelson-Brantley grew up surrounded by business leaders. Her stepfather owned a radiator repair shop, and her paternal grandfather founded a manufacturing company specializing in advertising products.

After graduating from Kansas State University with a degree in psychology and a minor in business, she went to work at her grandfather’s company, starting in accounting. Nelson-Brantley later becoming the company’s North Pacific regional sales director, where she headed a department of 25 graphic design artists. In this position, she enjoyed leading a diverse team and fostering a healthy work environment where the employees could do their best work.

But after several years, Nelson-Brantley found herself thinking about making a career change. Married and the mother of two young sons, she was feeling the urge to do something more meaningful with her life. She thought a lot about the kind of person she hoped her boys would see as they became adults, and she knew she wanted to serve a greater purpose.

When she received an annual holiday letter from her cousin, who described leaving a career in journalism to go to nursing school at the University of Kansas Medical Center, “a lightbulb went off,” Nelson-Brantley remembered.

“I went upstairs and told my spouse that I finally knew what I wanted to be,” Nelson-Brantley said. “I realized I had been missing the psychological aspect of caring for other people.”

Her cousin recommended that she begin by taking a certified nurse’s aide course, so she took an evening course at Johnson County Community College, which allowed her to work with patients with Alzheimer’s and dementia at the Good Samaritan Center. Nelson-Brantley was hooked.

“I fell in love with a lady who was at least 100 years old,” she said. “I was sitting there with her crying at the thought of never seeing her again on my last day. And she was a KU grad, too.”

In 2009, Nelson-Brantley entered the BSN program at that elderly patient’s alma mater. She excelled in the program, maintaining a 4.0 grade point average and earning clinical awards while also serving in a number of student leadership roles.

In 2011, her senior year, she was a finalist for the March of Dimes Nurse of the Year award in the Rising Star category. Also that year, after writing an article for the National Student Nurses’ Association magazine, Imprint, she was the first KU School of Nursing undergraduate invited to speak at the group’s annual conference.

Meanwhile, Rita Clifford, Ph.D., RN, then Associate Dean for Student Affairs at the KU School of Nursing, was encouraging Nelson-Brantley to pursue a doctorate in nursing and a career in academia.

“I was always impressed with her ideas, her dedication to the projects and her intelligent, measured approach,” said Clifford. “She was curious and sought data to support her positions. These are all characteristics of a researcher.”

After graduation, Nelson-Brantley started working as a staff RN in the medical intensive care unit at The University of Kansas Hospital and taking some pre-requisites for the Ph.D. program. Then Nelda Godfrey, Ph.D., RN, ACNS-BC, FAAN, Associate Dean for Innovative Partnerships and Practice at the KU School of Nursing, suggested teaching in the affiliate faculty program, which would let her trade one nursing shift a week to teach a clinical group. Nelson-Brantley remembered that what she had loved most about her old career was helping people learn how to do the work, and decided to try it. And that was it.

“I was driving to the medical center one morning knowing I was going to teach, and I was so excited,” she remembered. “It was the coolest thing ever."

She also was beginning to discover that her business background was combining with her love of clinical care to fuel a deep interest in health systems leadership and nursing workforce issues. In 2011, the Institute of Medicine published The Future of Nursing: Leading Change, Advancing Health, a report calling on nurses to take a leadership role in an expanding, changing the health care system.

“It said that nurses were perfectly positioned to lead the change in health care,” Nelson-Brantley said. “But how do we teach nurses to do this work? That’s how I got interested in the idea of leading change.”

That idea became the focus of her dissertation. Nelson-Brantley did a concept analysis and identified five key attributes: individual and collective leadership, operational support, fostering relationships, organizational learning and balance.

She wanted to find a specific health care organizational change to study for her

dissertation. She searched for hospitals that had achieved Magnet status, a prestigious designation signifying excellence in nursing, reasoning that these hospitals had likely led their own internal change to improve their care. Nelson-Brantley decided on Waverly Health Center, a 25-bed hospital in rural Iowa, the only critical access hospital ever to receive Magnet status.

“I have always been influenced by complexity science and general systems theory, which states that a system is more than the sum of its parts,” she said. “This hospital was the perfect opportunity for me to be able to study a system in its entirety.”

Nelson-Brantley found that the key attributes identified through her concept analysis were present in this hospital’s journey to Magnet and concluded that that there may be underlying effective principles for leading change that transcend hospital size or health care setting. Her dissertation earned several awards, including the Roma Lee Taunton Research Medal. Her work is actually a continuation of the research into nursing workforce issues begun by Taunton, points out Marjorie Bott, Ph.D., RN, Nelson-Brantley’s dissertation advisor.

“Heather is one of the top students I have ever advised and mentored,” Bott said. “She looks at the whole system and takes the time to capture the entire story.”

Last year, Nelson-Brantley received the 2016 Early Career Achievement Award in Nursing from the KU Medical Center Alumni Association, which honors a deserving graduate who has made an outstanding contribution to the field. She continues to draw from her previous career, most recently the graphic arts aspect: she is learning about the use of data visualization techniques to promote healthy behaviors for people with low levels of health literacy.

But she says that perhaps her greatest achievement has been teaching and mentoring more than 400 nursing students. Last year, when KU nursing student Sima Agayeva nominated Nelson-Brantley for a DAISY Faculty Award, she wrote: “She has many projects going at once, but never when approaching her for help have I felt as if she couldn’t make time for me.”

Nelson Brantley was honored to receive the award.

“I love caring for people,” she said. “The only thing better is helping other people who want to do the same thing.” ▪

FALL 2017