When choosing her career path in college, Nicole Seraphine thought she didn’t want to be a nurse because her mother was one.

She received her bachelor’s degree from Hanover College and master’s from the University of Louisville in exercise physiology.

While working on her master’s degree, she worked in the Quality Program (now Outcomes Management) at Baptist Hospital East, then transferred to Cardiac Rehabilitation.

“I decided early on that I didn’t want to be a nurse just because my mother was,” Seraphine said, “but the more I was exposed to it, the more I wanted to be a nurse. I had my mom’s support, and my aunt and cousin were nurses, so I had all these nurses around me. I liked the caring and the technology that went along with it.”

Seraphine then went to Bellarmine University for her bachelor’s degree in nursing, then returned to Baptist East. She has been a nurse for eight years, and a nurse manager since 2006.

“Nursing has so many opportunities and routes – you can work in a hospital, a doctor’s office, in insurance,” Seraphine noted. “It’s a very stable job and once you get your degree, you can pretty much do whatever you want to do. You can move, you can travel.

“Baptist East has extremely top-notch nursing. Everyone works as a team and is very close-knit,” she went on. “That’s one of the reasons I’ve stayed and grown in the organization – everyone is so friendly, helpful and dedicated. Everyone is always open to the newest thing and willing to change. As a nurse manager, I am the one bringing this change into the environment. It makes my job easier to help them grow in the whole healthcare spectrum.”

Seraphine saw her job as a critical care nurse educator as an extremely valuable one to Baptist East. “I was able to spend a lot of time learning about newer techniques and skills and bring those to the units to expose all the nurses on the floor who don’t have time and materials to learn about them,” she said. “I think they depended on me to expose them to what other facilities are doing and how to be better.”

Seraphine saw great things happen. One positive she saw is the influence of the various nursing councils. “One of my responsibilities is to bring in new ideas, but I think that anyone can bring new ideas to their nurse manager, director or administration,” she said. “Now with the councils in place, ideas are actually brought to the table and not lost somewhere along the line. People from multiple areas can bring ideas up. We’re doing much better with that than before.”

To Seraphine, patient satisfaction is a natural by-product of doing a job well. “My job is to make sure the staff is properly doing their job on a daily basis and are comfortable and competent in what they are doing,” she explained. “If they are comfortable and competent, then they are going to be satisfying the patient and the patient’s family because they are going to be doing the right thing all the time. When  I was a nurse educator, I held in-services for every staff member to provide information on the latest topics and issues that we dealt with every day. The goal was to increase patient care, which in turn affects patient satisfaction."

Not long afterward, the unit was honored by the American Association of Critical Care Nurses with the Beacon award for excellence in critical care nursing.

In 2006, Seraphine was named nurse manager of the Neurosciences unit.