Page 18 - Healthcare Heroes 2025

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A P R O G R A M O F B U S I N E S S W E S T & H E A L T H C A R E N E W S
“Last year was
“I want them
Bertheaud >>Continued from page H16
the first year I was
able to get every
single student into
to realize,
inpatient, which was
‘that could be
really important, and which was a request of the students because
they may never see the inside of a psychiatric unit, an acute
me. I’m one
locked ward, unless they have experience through school. It’s a
car accident
completely different kind of unit. I’ve had nurses that have been
away from
teaching or practicing for 50 years, and they’ll say, ‘what happens
behind those closed doors?’
having a
“I’ve actually invited people in the hospital I worked at, in
traumatic
administration, for three or four hours on my shift doing direct
care and have them follow me so they’ll understand what a
brain injury.
psychiatric nurse does and how we approach people, how we
Then my whole
set boundaries,” she went on. “And they have really interesting
questions because, again, they don’t know the skill. I didn’t learn
world would
it in ICU.
change, and
“So this is a very different skill set,” she went on. “I try to get
as many students exposed to that and help them destigmatize
this is how I
that population. They come in terrified the first shift. One group
would act.’”
was panicked, and I had to hold them off from going onto the
unit because they were so nervous. I had to sit there and talked
about their feelings until I had them settled enough so I could go
onto the floor — because you don’t want to bring that kind of
energy onto a psychiatric ward. They have enough energy and
dysfunction as it is.”
But while teaching safety and boundaries to students,
Bertheaud also emphasizes empathy and humanity.
“I want them to realize, ‘that could be me. I’m one car accident
away from having a traumatic brain injury. Then my whole world
would change, and this is how I would act.’ Elms students tend
to be very, very smart, but because of their background, some
of them — not all, but some of them — don’t have exposure to
people who have had challenges.
“So I try to work on teamwork,” she added. “I’ve worked with
some of the best teams in nursing, where I called it a symphony —
all of a sudden everybody’s getting into their spot, and everybody
knows what they’re doing to do. It’s just like music, and we can
handle anything that comes through that door. But it takes skill. It
takes working together with people who are very, very different.”
Bertheaud was also recently certified in bioethics and medical
humanities, having taken classes with Dr. Peter DePergola, one of
the region’s foremost medical ethicists and an associate professor
at Elms.
“It’s about understanding the history, how we got here, and
understanding how we can be more ethical,” she said. “Nurses are
generally ethical — some of them not so much, but I think we’re
at an advantage because we work with patients one on one, so we
want better outcomes. I think when you get up to administration,
that’s where we drop the ball — when you go up and you’re away
from those patients; you’re not doing direct care. That’s when we
get into making decisions that aren’t always outcome-based.
“In the last 40 years, I’ve seen healthcare become very
monetized and profit-minded,” she added. “So I want to kind of
instill that back in and have these young nurses challenged in this
way. I want them to be able to see the bigger picture and look
for the best outcomes and really be ethical nurses, challenge the
system.”
And, again, challenging the system means understanding it,
through real-world experience, from very early on.
“I think, in leadership, we’re focused on degrees, which is
helpful. I’m all for education, but I think we need to incorporate
experience a little bit into it. I’ve seen nurses that come into
nursing school going, ‘I want to be an NP,’ ‘I want to be a DNP,’ ‘I
want to be a provider.’ And I’m like, you’ve got to walk before you
run. You’ve got to know all these things before you can get to the
next level.”
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