Innovative Nursing Education Created by Nurses for Nurses who are SICK & TIRED of the Status Quo! Episode 12: Season 2 - Antra Boyd & Karen DiMarco

Thank you for joining me for another episode of the Nursing Strategies for Success podcast with this week's guests, Antra Boyd and Karen DeMarco. Antra and Karen created RNegade to start to tackle the cluster that is nursing education. They want to talk about why healthcare needs a major overhaul and how nurses are the best people to change the system for the better. They like to say that they're blowing up the boxes that everyone else is still trying to think outside of. They are both savvy nurse entrepreneurs who are mutually addicted to geeking out on cutting-edge health science and their passion for transforming the US medical system. So let's welcome Antra and Karen to the show. Welcome to the Nursing Strategies for Success podcast, brought to you by The Nurse Speak, a show where we rally some of our nation's greatest nurse leaders, educators, experts, and advocates to tackle some of our greatest challenges that the nursing profession faces. My name is Damion Jenkins, and I'm your host for this show. So sit back, relax, and get ready to learn that nurses can do anything. Okay, thank you so much, Anshra and Karen, for being on the Nursing Strategies for Success podcast. I want to thank you so much for being here with me today. Anshra, why don't you take a moment, introduce yourself for the listeners, let them know a little bit about who you are, where you started in nursing, and where you are today.

Okay, thank you for having us on the podcast. It's super exciting. So let's see, I've been a nurse for 25 plus years. I started, um, right out of my baccalaureate program. I went into the United States Navy and I served 6 years of active duty, and it's kind of where they grew me up as a nurse. So I ended up right in, into the operating room after a year on med surg, and I spent my entire career in the operating room, 20 years. And I got very frustrated in the very kind of back end of, of that part of my career because change was so freaking slow inside the system. And you could see how there were poor outcomes because of poor communication, poor teamwork, all these things that we have talked about and researched. And, you know, it's— it becomes this like background hum because nobody ever does anything about it. And I was, you know, signing up for things like Patient Champion and, you know, Crucial Conversations and let's, you know, rah rah. And yeah, the OR staff really wanted nothing to do with me. And it got a little frustrating. And I said, well, I wonder if I can help people one at a time outside the system navigate it better. And so I left my career at the bedside and started with another colleague, started a patient advocacy consulting business. And we help, uh, patients here in Portland, Oregon navigate healthcare. So someone will call with cancer, for example, and say, I don't know what my options are. I don't know what questions to ask the doctor. And we help them through that process. It, has been very fulfilling, but it's also slow. It's one patient at a time. And I again had that urge to like, I want to help a lot of people. I want to change the systems. So I'm still helping. I'm still a patient advocate. I still have a very active and thriving business. Um, and right a year into that business, I got diagnosed with cancer, ovarian cancer. And so it was a very interesting time because I was helping patients navigate healthcare and asking the right questions and going to doctor's appointments and making sure they got the full standard, if not better, care. And yet I couldn't even hear a thing the doctor was saying in my own appointments. And so it was a really interesting switch to be the patient, and that gave me a lot of perspective on, on, you know, so many things that need to change in nursing. And Karen and I have been friends for a long time. We always knew we wanted to do something, and so that is kind of how, you know, I'm still advocating for patients with my business, but we're also on another mission. And so I'll let Karen introduce herself.

Awesome, thank you, lovely. All right, Karen.

Um, I'm Karen DeMarco. Thanks for me too, it's always fun to meet like minds. Um, I graduated. I've been a nurse for, I don't know, 90— since '94. I mean, I graduated '96, but I was already working in an ICU, like, doing nursing things. Yeah, University of Michigan, and went right into ICU, trauma, flight nursing, all the high adrenaline stuff. Um, but like Antra, it was like, it, it was not just what I saw in the hospital, but You know, as a nurse, when friends or family or acquaintances tell you some horror story, you know, of something that happened and you're like, oh, if I was there, that wouldn't have happened.

Yep.

You know, and I think, yeah, I got so tired of hearing that and feeling that frustration. And I was like, this, if people don't have a nurse in the family who knows the questions to ask and the standard of care that should be delivered, and you know, they should be able to hire one. Yes. So I actually, did a couple pilot programs, um, of a patient— my own patient advocacy business, but it kept stopping and starting because I was raising young kids.

Sure.

Meanwhile, in the 10 years I had those stops and starts, a woman in Arizona, Karen Mercero, had been starting a business and failing all the fails and learning how to do it. And then by the time I was ready to really start my patient advocacy business, she had a program, and I'm like, oh good, I can learn all the legal ins and outs of becoming a private patient advocate through her. And I thought that's what I was going to learn, to help people be safer within the healthcare system, the nurse and the family. That was 10% of it. It was, I always say this, Auntie's probably tired of hearing me say, it was like going into that program, I thought the world was flat and then someone showed me a satellite picture. It was like, oh my, we learned all about functional integrative alternative medicine, epigenetics, nutrigenomic systems biology, all this root cause stuff that we aren't taught in— well, they're not even taught that in medical school, you know. We're not taught that in nursing school, that people— like, our Western healthcare system is very limited. It's great for acute care medicine, but chronic illness, um, and things that can reverse chronic illness that we don't even— you know, it's just poo-pooed here. Um, so that's kind of became— plus, at the same time, when I started my business, I was going through my own health crisis. Um, and for a longer podcast, I'd tell the story, but basically I had a spontaneous remission when I saw something very profound for myself. And that all of my— I was very sick because I was constantly on red alert in a chronic stress response, worrying about what people thought of me.

Yeah.

All my life. And my symptoms, when I had that kind of like awakening and, oh my gosh, that's what's causing it, all my symptoms were gone in 3 weeks. And so I went on. So my— I had this private patient advocacy business, but I was like, what the heck just happened to me? So I was also researching radical remission and, and, um, you know, those kinds of things, and ended up meeting someone else who had the same experience that I did. And we ended up doing research in 2017, and that's published in the, um, APA journal Spirituality in Clinical Practice. Um, so I kind of went into— it evolved into corporate wellness and kind of like public speaking and then doing programs online. And my private patient advocacy business started to fade away. And that's when I met Antra. She was— went through the same program I did, and we just fell in love. So we knew that— we knew that eventually we were going to do something together. And now I think it was October of last year because There's so much wrong, there's so much rot in the healthcare system.

Yes.

And the people— and it's so difficult to change it from the inside because there's so many people who get— who benefit from it remaining broken.

Correct.

And so through nursing education and public education, uh, we thought maybe a grassroots thing, you know, and people need to know what we know. How do we tell as many people? So we started the RN Engage podcast. And not only did we start that, but we thought nurses are learning all the time. I mean, we're so curious and we don't get credit for it. We have to go every 2 years, depending on your state's requirements, we have to go and pick through a pile of crap, this antiquated, outdated food pyramid kind of information. And that it's an insult to our intelligence and our curiosity and our valuable time. And I listen to podcasts all the time. And I was listening to a Joe Rogan podcast one day. We had this guy, James Nestor, who wrote a book called Breathe. And those 2 hours were so entertaining and enlightening and enriching. It gave me information that will not only improve my life, but also my nursing practice and what I teach my clients and stuff.

Can I just— I just want to say really quickly to that point, I listened to the same podcast. It changed my practice as an OR nurse to listen to this guy talk about the risks associated with sinus surgery that we never tell our patients, that doctors don't tell their patients, not because they don't want to, because there's not enough time, because it's a system problem, right? But to her point, like, it changed my practice listening to Joe Rogan and James Nestor talk about breathing. Like, that's the kind of learning that changes our practice, that makes us better nurses.

And it's new and cutting edge because those are the kind of people that are on podcasts. So I got done and I called her. I'm like, why is that not worth $2,000?

CEs, right?

I mean, we're doing it all the time naturally anyway. So we started our Renegade— it's kind of like pod courses. So we have these cutting-edge experts, renegades in their field, people who are entertaining and inspiring and have just incredible stories. And if you're a nurse and you listen to it, you can get a CE. I mean, anyone can listen to it, but it's, uh, Karen.

So Karen, tell them a little bit more about kind of what we're seeing now in that and the, um, sort of ethos of RN to GATE and how the message is just getting so clear to us.

Please tell me. It's— this is fascinating.

This is good stuff.

The new tagline, once I saw what we were really up to, because CEs are just a side effect.

Yep.

Um, the new tagline is CEs for nurses who don't just do what they're told.

Aha, how about that?

And nurses do do what they're told. The just in that is really important because we're discerning and we're waking up and we're— and it reminded me when I was writing the copy and kind of really distilling down what we're really up to in the world, uh, I thought of the Bill of Rights, you know, and I translated it for nurses. We give our power to administrations and academies and systems because we're busy doing the things that make healthcare run, taking care of patients and, you know, educating people ourselves. We're not in charge of anything, but we give them our— their— our power because we have families to raise and lives to live and whatever. But they've screwed it up.

Yep.

You're fired. We're taking our power back, you know. It's our right and our responsibility to take the power back to fix the system. Now, it's too hard because there's, like I said, there's too many people who benefit from the way it is. So little by little, what you're doing, you know, before you hit record, what you were talking about and made me go, "Anja!" Right?

Yeah.

Um, but it's people like that who— and, and nurses, you, you said that you alluded to this too. Nurses are— they're all feeling it, but we feel so alone.

Yeah.

And we're interviewing people constantly who are doing something about it. So it's that too. It's letting nurses— like, there are people who are going to change this, turn the ship around.

That's it. That's exactly it. And that's the purpose of this podcast, is to not only provide strategies for success. So if someone's struggling in a particular area within their practice, they can listen to experts like yourself who can help them navigate some of those complexities, but also to really shine a light for the general public to know, hey, we nurses are out here doing our own thing when we can't continue to just feed the machine that turns out the status quo. And, you know, we can't keep showing up at the hospitals who are keeping salaries low, who are keeping us short-staffed, who are continuously not allowing to fulfill our true ability within our role as nurses and be yes-men and women. We can't do that. It's, it's time to say no. And that's why you're seeing this exodus. This is why you're seeing a lot of nurse entrepreneurs popping up. The National Nurses in Business Association has people flocking to them to help them learn how to create businesses where they can provide services within their own scope of practice without having to be under the direction of administration or physicians who oftentimes are in it for the profit. Yeah. And not really to make radical change or to improve the system or process. And it's not for everyone. We all know doctors who are really amazing doctors who try to stretch their power to the fullest extent of their ability.

Of course.

But, you know, again, it's just a few in a big machine where so many benefit from it being broken. I couldn't have said it better, Karen.

I think it's really so important that we realize that it is our right and our responsibility.

Yes.

So often it's easy to just feel overwhelmed by the machine, right? And oh, what is little old me going to do?

Right.

But we gave them that power so we could take care of patients. And now it's time we take it back. It's time we have sovereignty over our own selves. I'm sure you've read gobs and gobs of literature about lifelong learning and critical thinking and, you know, stay in education so that you, you know, can continue to up-level yourself in your profession. Why can't we choose what that education is? Why do we have to go schlep some stupid insulin gauge CE credit just to renew my license when I don't even deal with diabetes? I don't care two cents about insulin gauges because I don't ever practice with that piece of information. That might be invaluable for somebody else, but I should choose what I'm learning. I should be in charge of my education. And I think, you know, this, this CE, you know, it started grassroots as a CE by podcast, but it has tentacles into education because you can see, you know, we are, we are, we are producing grads who are totally unprepared to go into clinical practice.

Absolutely.

And why is that? Like, we have to ask ourselves, right?

We don't, we don't have enough hours in the month, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, the This is a 15-parter. I mean, I learned, okay, 2 things. Number 1, which is really cool, and for anybody listening to this who's interested, we found that we got our CE providership. It was a pain in the butt, but we wanted this format of education because everybody's doing it anyway. You know, we wanted it to be— we wanted to value nurses' time and their intellect and their curiosity and allow them to get rewarded for what they're naturally doing. Well, it wasn't as easy as we thought to make it so seamless and click simple to listen to a podcast, do an activity, and get a CE. Sounds simple, but it wasn't.

Yeah.

So we created a whole platform. We took the pain, did the platform, and it's like, oh my gosh, now anybody could do this. So it's like a mall, you know, like we have our— the Renegade Podcast is one store in the mall. But if you're an educator, or if you're a content creator, if you have a podcast, or if you just, you know, have had something you're uniquely qualified to teach nurses. You can set up a kiosk or a shop in the mall, and we can help you with your CEs. And so we wanted to make education widely available, interesting, entertaining, inspiring, and fun, and allow more nurses to share their expertise. So, so it developed like two businesses developed out of the one.

Yes.

Uh, yeah, it was so, it was Yeah, really cool.

It's— I mean, that sounds really cool. And it's, um, you know, I truly believe in divine timing and things of that sort, um, because this is a journey of my own that I've been trying to seek out for quite a long time. And, you know, the pandemic, you know, messed all of us up and kind of slowed us down in many ways. Um, but this idea, you know, is brilliant. It's something that I was thinking about either in whole or partnership or I'm wondering why myself, when I need to get CEs, why do I have to keep doing again the same boring, non-informative things that I already know this stuff? Like, we've already gone through this stuff over and over again, but there's not a lot of really interesting, fun, you know, highly specialized CE courses out there being created by nurses in a space of their own, which is really—

you're already doing a lot of it, I bet. I mean, I bet you're reading books and listening to podcasts.

Of course.

Videos all the time.

Of course.

So there's got to be a way. I mean, not got to be, there is a way.

There is a way.

There is.

Well, and the other thing too is, you know, I mean, all we hear about is I'm stressed and I'm burnt out and I have so much going on and I have a family and a job and blah blah blah. Like, why can't you listen to a CE in a car on an errand? Or, you know, why does it have to be— Karen, of course, you know, let her license lapse, had to get her 30 CCs, and she signed up for some CEs that relatively interesting content-wise, but they sent her CDs that chained her to a computer that doesn't even take CDs. And this was 2 years ago. I'm sorry. Really? That is just—

What?

So strategy for success, don't order 4 6-hour lectures on CD. I mean, this is just 101 basic. Well, let's make it easy. Let's make it Make it simple.

I mean, the company could have at least put their recordings on YouTube and just sent you a private link.

Or a digital download or something.

Something. Right?

It's fascinating content. But yeah, and the point about nurses being unprepared, that's another part we want to change or disrupt or do something. Like, I went to 4 years at the time University of Michigan was one of the top-rated nursing schools in the country. Graduated, first job was in an ICU. And I remember the night before my preceptorship started, my orientation, I was talking to these new Canadian nurses who were, you know, just off of their orientation. And I went for a beer with them and I'm like, ah, how do you know all this stuff? ICU has its own language, right? Same as OR, same as any specialty. And I was like panicking I just went through 4 years of a bachelor program and I'm like, I don't even speak your language. They're like, no, we learned it all in the last 3 months, you'll be fine. And they were right. But I use 5% of what I learned in nursing school. Yeah, why can't you know— so one of the things that our Enneagate wants to do is recruit people like you.

Yeah.

And, and maybe try to integrate it into nursing programs, or at least give nurses a path from graduation to clinical that accelerates their learning, right? Because now it's so different than when, when I started. You know, there was plenty of staff, there's— the preceptor could support me and help me and whatever. Now it's like every man— from what we're hearing, it's like every man for himself.

Good luck. I can, I can attest it's still that way. It has not gotten better. It's getting worse by the day.

The number of young nurses that we've interviewed who have either hit the road after 6 months or have stopped and been like, what am I doing? I'm just— I'm passing patients through a system that never gets them better.

Yep.

I mean, that's insanity. Insanity. And, you know, we're talking about 21, 22, 23-year-olds, right? People, women, men right out of college, not these old battle axes like myself who've been around the block. Can you even— I can't even imagine. After 6 months thinking, oh my gosh, I'm not helping anybody get better, I'm out of here, this is too stressful.

I mean, if you haven't, if you haven't heard me share this story before, but I graduated in 2010, good 12 years ago. Things have changed drastically since then, but 6 months into my nursing career as a registered nurse with my first job, you guys almost lost me too. 10 years ago, it was terrible, and it has not gotten better in these last 12 years. It's been getting worse.

Yeah, right. So it's the blowing up the box instead of merely thinking outside of it. How are we going to change education in a way that leads new nurses into the profession prepared, confident, and excited about what they're doing? They're getting paid, you know. I mean, there's all kinds of tentacles off of, off of this conversation, obviously pay and burnout.

So many of them.

But the one little piece, right, that is our circle right now is continuing education because it was a place to start. You know, I mean, Karen made the point last night, we're curating our own content just by doing podcasts because we're interviewing the people that we want to talk to, right?

Absolutely.

Right? And so why can't all nurses do that? And then we can extend, you know, out.

I have two messages of hope. Especially for any young—

please, listening to this, please.

The first is, when you listen to our podcast, we interview nurses, other nurses who are affecting change. Like, instead of— it's like the opposite of Magnet Hospital, because that's just a, oh, you have a Magnet Hospital stamp, well, good for you.

It's a marketing ploy.

Yes. All that means is that you're gonna make me do more shizzle.

Exactly. Put more of a burden on me and then be mad that I want a raise because you spent over $100,000 in order to qualify for the magnet status because it's really just a marketing ploy.

Yes. Yeah, but there's nurses who are creating rating systems for hospitals. We've, we've actually interviewed two that nurses will be able to say how they're like employee satisfaction, how they feel the patient safety is, how safe they feel at work, what kind of ratios they have, what kind of pay they have. And rate the hospitals. Their mission is so instead of a Magnet hospital, the hospitals are going to want to say it's like Blueberry, right? Blueberry is the rating system. They're going to want a 5-star Blueberry rating because that means that they'll be able to recruit and retain high-quality employees and nurses. So that's hopeful that's going on. And the other thing is another— we had a I, I know it might be hard to believe, maybe even for you. We used to love to go to work. Yeah, I used to love to go to work. I would wake up excited to jump out of bed because I loved the people I worked with. We were able to— we got in, we got— became nurses to heal. I mean, it's, it's a vocation more than a profession. And we had time. We had time to spend with one another. We had time to help each other. We had time to spend with our patients. It was all the reward that you expect you're going to gain and a decent living and a flexible living for family and all that stuff like that. But yeah, we want to make it like that again.

Yeah.

Do you remember when you used to love to go to, go to work? I mean, I do.

Well, I, I mean, I still love going to work because what I've— what I learned early in my career, and I think it helped me that nursing was a second career for me and not straight out of school, so I didn't have to learn how to become a working professional. I was already there. Um, so, but I found very quickly at that 6-month mark when nursing almost left me and I did a little bit of soul searching and I found my passion within the space and then saw the gaps that I knew I would be good at filling and then focused on creating myself into an amazing nurse educator so I can help fill a lot of those gaps.

That's when I fell in love with going to work every day, which I love so much because it just points to this idea that each of us right? We can sit with ourselves, we can find out what am I good at, what do I love, where am I gonna have the most influence and be able to help the most. And, you know, your story of, of sitting down and sort of sorting that out for yourself is, is what every single one of us as nurses need to do, because that's when the right and the responsibility to say no more will happen, is when you take sovereignty over you, right? And you decide what you're gonna do with your career. Like, so kudos to you, that's awesome.

Thank you.

I love that, super inspiring.

Yeah, thank you. And so, uh, I can't remember which one of you said it, but one of you also said that it's, it's not only our right, it's our responsibility, um, to take ownership over our actions within the nursing space and then to also, you know, hold each other accountable as well. And so, uh, the guests that I had on the show that airs last week, Tina Baxter, she says in the episode that really one of the biggest things that changes the way that you find success within your, within your career as a nurse is changing your mindset from, you know, half glass, um, what is it, glass half empty to glass half full. You really just have to kind of step up and say, well, if I want change, then I need to be part of that change instead of expecting someone else to do it. So when your manager or your DON or your, you know, VP is asking for people to join committees, asking for people to be on, you know, boards and things like that, that they need to be, that we have to make time for those things. And of course, we've all been in the situation where we're strapped on the unit and we're like, we can't possibly even go pee on, you know, when we need to, how are we going to sit on a committee? But, you know, it's just like going and sometimes waiting in line to vote for 6 hours. You have to do it if you want, if you want to elicit that change.

And so, yeah, I mean, until the glass is half empty, the glass is half full is just for now, because yeah, what really needs to happen is we need to shatter the glass.

Break the glass.

You break the glass because you're just inside a broken system trying to make improvements. And you can make it better, you can affect some change and at least make yourself feel empowered that you're doing something. Yep.

Yep.

But the people— we got to get a hold of CNOs and deans of schools of nursing and people who are also renegades, you know, who, who see this but they don't know where's my support because they're also up against a, you know, pushing a boulder uphill through tar.

Exactly. And so, you know, we need to be innovative and start creating new positions for nurses. Um, I know that this is what we're doing as entrepreneurs. We're creating our own systems that we can use to not only help our fellow nurses but also to help patients. Um, you know, being a patient advocate— are either one of you a certified nurse coach?

Yeah, well, not a certified nurse coach. I collect coaching certifications and see glass though.

I highly recommend, um, since this is one of your tentacles, if you get your certification in nurse coaching, this is one of the few opportunities where nurses have a right to bill insurance for their services, which is a nice new entry into kind of becoming our own independent practice without the need of a physician or anything like that. And of course we can refer if you wanted to do direct patient-facing stuff, but then we also have the capacity to coach in a very meaningful, very impactful way, um, our colleagues and people who need to find their way. Way, through awareness strategies, through, you know, just having someone to, to be a sounding board for them, um, and so that they can find alignment within their career so that they can leverage their skill set as nurses. Because we can really do anything, and I, I think it's an amazing career for ourselves without relying on traditional hospital, you know, bedside nursing.

Yeah, I think that's part of the issue, is that nurses, you know, if I think back to when I worked in the operating room, you'd be hard-pressed to find anybody who, who is really thinking, oh my gosh, I have all these amazing skills. I bet I could do A, B, or C. And in fact, you know, when I started to take the leap off of, you know, the bedside into this other world of entrepreneurs, people were like, what are you doing? Why are you doing that?

Well, of course, how are you going to make a living off of that?

You know, and I just didn't care.

What about health insurance? What about PTO?

Yeah, so that, that is a really interesting point, is like pointing nurses to this fact that we have such a huge skill set and it can be used in so many innovative, cool ways, right? So yeah, I, I agree with you there. I don't know that we're all quite awake to the power that we have.

Yeah, we're not, because nursing school doesn't teach it. I mean, I can't—

it's—

we're in 2022 now, right? I mean, we're not in like the '30s anymore, last I checked, but I still have people coming straight out of nursing school, straight out of nursing school. They weren't even out long enough to forget anything. And they still say the same thing that I heard when I was in class, that we can't use medical diagnoses in a nursing diagnosis because we're not doctors.

Oh, what?

That teaches us nothing about our power. Or the skill set that we have to verify or validate abnormal findings and to really make sure that we understand why our nursing diagnoses are so important, because the rest of the team relies on those before they can even consider ordering diagnostic studies to confirm. But they don't teach that in nursing school. And I taught in nursing programs for years before I decided to also leave the, you know, corporate bureaucratic red tape academia that doesn't really fix anything either.

No, it's— yeah, that's a sorry state of affairs as well.

It sounds like, you know, we're like-minded folk. So we see, we see the problems, we see the gaps. So what are you doing? You have this amazing podcast opportunity for people to get their CEs, which is great. Um, these are for already licensed professionals, right?

Well, anyone can listen to it.

Sure, anyone can listen to it, but if you want the CEs, you have to already have a license, correct?

Or a certification.

Or a certification.

You're going to have your license anyways and all your certifications.

Like, you can find it on, um, you know, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, you know, all those things, um, wherever you find podcasts. But if you go to myportal.pro and you're a nurse, you can get a CE credit for Um, yeah, but so it's not just the— it started with the podcast, that was the idea, but actually my portal, like the portal that we created for people, other innovators and educators and, you know, content creators who also want to affect change, um, to give them a way to do it and without the pain of having to figure it out themselves because we already did that for them. Nice, you know. So just one of the more people will have access to their voices Nice.

And one of the things that we did early on, I mean, we've interviewed a ton of nurses, a ton of innovators, and one of our very first guests was a— she's a nurse who's an expert on lymphedema, and her story in the podcast is jaw-dropping. But we, Karen and I, were so mesmerized by how little we knew about lymphedema, and we've been nurses forever. So it's like, I've been an OR nurse forever, and I never even once heard that word in the operating room, which is crazy pants. So when, when we find nurses who have this really like expertise in an area, it's like, oh my gosh, every hospital should have a course on lymphedema because it affects the patients in every single silo of care.

Again, the rest of their lives, and for the rest of their lives.

And how come an OR nurse doesn't know about lymphedema? How come, you know, It's that— it's 2022, like you said. And even in my advocacy business, that podcast, just the 1 hour we spent with her, has helped me with my own clients. So now we've asked her to help us build a bigger course that's more in-depth and talks way more in-depth about lymphedema. And it's, you know, all— everything lymphedema, actually. And so then a nurse can get on the portal and they say, I want to learn about lymphedema. This is going to give me 5 CEs. And the information is being taught by nurses, the experts. Yeah, I mean, listening, listening to this nurse, you would, you would be amazed at how much the doctors in and around her don't even know what it is. Wow. Because they're not taught it, right?

Yeah, it's true. Where, you know, we only need to, we only need to be taught enough in nursing school to pass the NCLEX. The rest we learn on the job.

So, so we have these just amazing, brilliant nurses who know know so much. Why are we not getting that information from them and teaching other nurses about it?

Yeah, and Karen, you're right, that does need to change. We can't have just minimum standard anymore. We can't, you know, it's just too— there's too many complex issues that require, you know, high-level practitioners that really— that require and demand critical thinking and confidence and conflict resolution skills and effective communication. And honestly You know, sure, in some instances I feel like we do a good job of teaching that, but the biggest problem that I've identified as an educator in every facet of the space that an educator can be in the nursing profession, um, is follow-through. If that's the same— that's— it's follow-through. One person starts something but no one carries it on. When that person leaves It stops. The person gets sick or dies, it stops. No one carries it through. And everyone wants a quick fix, even the best of the best. We all just— we want something quick and easy, but we all know that that's not how you, you know, create effective change. Nothing is quick and easy.

I, I agree with that, but I also see the effortless effort, right?

So many of us run in circles.

How do we learn the fast. Yeah, it's like I'm learning all the time. I love podcasts and audiobooks and YouTube videos and whatever. I'm learning all the time, and I have to do this redundant other CE crap every 2 years, right? That's a waste of time and an insult to me, you know, my intelligence, my time, my curiosity, everything. There's so much that they're already doing. Like, Damion, how do nurses learn best? You graduate you get a preceptor and there's veterans on the floors. They learn through mentoring, roundtables, going out to dinner after work, talking about your cases, learning from each other. All the research shows that that conversational mentoring kind of stuff, whether on the job or with your colleagues afterward, is how you absorb and retain best.

Yep.

So why don't we eliminate all of the stuff that's that's ineffective and inefficient and doesn't work anyway and a waste of our time and replace those educational systems with what we know works.

Yep.

You know, so like you said, it's not hard. It's hard. It's not easy. Yes. Because we're doing what works on top of the stuff that doesn't. What if we eliminated the stuff that didn't, then it wouldn't feel hard and easy because we'd have all this time to do what worked.

I agree. I completely agree with that. All, all of the systems that I've improved over the years is by simplifying, removing redundancies, removing extra steps that are not actually going to create any positive outcome or, you know, prevent any kind of, you know, safety issue. Obviously, if it's safety or if it's any kind of legal requirements, those are usually the things that are non-negotiable. But yeah, we, we duplicate work too much. And it's the same thing in academia. It's the same thing in clinical education. It's the same thing in online education. A lot of people are just doing the same thing over and over again. And then here you are, the nurse, looking for resources that are not only going to prepare you, but you also want to enjoy doing it. You don't want to, you don't want to be like, oh my God, I have to do this, you know, 5-hour CE and You know, and trust me, we've all been there. Yeah, you pull out the vodka to get you through, or the knife to poke in your eyeball, and then by the time you get to the end of it, you don't remember any of it anyway. So yeah, you're right. Yeah, so cool. So you guys have this program, where can people find it?

Well, they can go to myportal.pro and sign up for free. There's um, you'll create a profile for yourself. You can store all of your CEs on that profile page, doesn't cost you anything. And they don't have to come from RNagate, and they don't have to come from RNagate.

Like snap a picture and upload it and we'll upload it, feed, water, and house all of your CEs. It'll keep track for you.

It'll keep track, and then when you're ready to submit, if you need to submit, you can just export the, the list from your portal and it will give you a nice handy printout with everything that you did. And then you can take it, you can listen to a podcast for free and try us out on the portal and get a CE for it. We have this cool feature, you know how you have to do an activity and an evaluation for your CEs? Well, we have this feature that you can voice talk into your device and just tell them, tell, answer the question through this, this feature, and it uploads into the system, and we have, you know, a background crew that Checks it, done.

Yeah, so it looks like this. You have to take your wife to the airport, and you are driving there, and she is on the phone, and, uh, so she's busy doing something else. So you're like, ah, I'll catch up on SCE. So you put on the podcast. By the time you get to the airport, you're done. Bye. And then you pull over on the side There's a question for an activity. You speak the answer into your phone. It's artificial intelligence that recognizes the right answer from keywords and stuff like that. You hit submit.

Bing!

CE comes to your mail and there's also a copy of it on your myplural.pro profile. And that's it. That's kind of how it works. And also when for the longer form courses, same thing. After each module, there's an activity question, blah, blah, blah, blah. Bing! You got your CE.

And then you can, you can, you know, there are a couple other ways you can, you can become a member and you can listen to, you know, RCEs by podcast for life, or, you know, being a member. Once you're, once you're signed up, you kind of just get to pick what you want.

It's a membership and we're going to have, you know, as part of the membership— oh, this is really fun, this is coming too. Um, so part of that like a CE. So say your CEs are due in 90 days and you haven't done any of them. We kind of keep track of everybody's CE license renewal date. And so we'll give you a notification of this group CE challenge. Like, so we'll curate, like, what do you want to learn about? And everybody listens to the same podcast. And then there's a forum to kind of talk about it, learn from each other, have a discussion. That's the activity, probably, instead of, you know, answering a question.

Yeah.

And and you know, you're doing it together in 30 days, you're done or something like that. So we have all kinds of interesting, innovative, learn from each other, but new cutting-edge information.

I love it.

Yeah.

myportal.pro. And you can check us out at—

not to confuse anyone, but like hopefully by next Tuesday, renegade.pro. That's R-N-E-G-A-D-E dot pro. That's kind of like the landing page for the podcast, but you can also go on there and check it out. That's the part that has CEs for nurses who don't just do what they're told.

How about that? Yeah, awesome.

Do you—

are you guys located anywhere else? Any social media where people can connect with you if they want to ping you or connect you on collaborative, you know, you know, feelings or anything like that? Where can they find you?

Yeah, if you want our help getting your content out there and having, uh, sorry, it's fine, uh, and, uh, getting CEs awarded for content that you've created, we can help you with that.

So we're on Instagram and Facebook at Our Renegade. Um, we— you can find me and Karen both on LinkedIn under Karen DeMarco and Entre Boyd, and there's all kinds of Renegade, Our Renegade stuff there. Uh, so we find us there, and we even have a TikTok account. That is—

but don't go there. Oh, YouTube channel! You could see all of our outtakes and how we really were horrible.

I mean, literally, this is so grassroots that we, Karen and I, I had no— you listened to the very first podcast, we had no idea what we were doing.

We had sat in front of one microphone together.

It's probably comical, and it's fun to kind of see how the evolution— like, look at my nice professional—

yeah, both, both of you have wonderful microphones.

I know, but we didn't in the first—

no, we shared this one. We sat in front, and then there was this one, this guy who's kind of an Instagram famous chiropractor guy, um, and he didn't show up because he had a kind of an emergency with a patient. So we were sitting there and it was— we were already recording, right? And you know what nurses do when they're together, right? It's actually on YouTube, our YouTube channel, Two Nurses Waiting for Tommy John, and we're talking about butt plugs.

Oh yeah, like, why not?

Stories about the things she's seen taken out of people and, you know, Oh my gosh, it's like— so we have fun.

But yeah, that's been the super fun—

nurse, always nurse.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. And for those of you who have not listened to Leanne Myers' Once a Nurse, Always a Nurse podcast, do that as well. Absolutely. She's been on forever, a long, long time. Yeah, she has. Um, she's very well known in the nurse community, a veteran to follow for sure.

Yeah, we've We've actually met her, Karen.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm sorry, we've met a lot of people.

We've met a lot of, a lot of nurses.

But yes, and a lot of us kind of cling together once we find out about each other. We're like, ooh, someone else in the space and the mindset that we're in to, you know, create radical change. And yeah, you know, for those of you who have not listened to the episode with Leanne Meyer, please go back and listen to that because, um, she is really working with some brilliant nurses to try to push legislation to change our payment model so that we can break free from the chains of working for hospitals and more for working for our profession.

You know what, I— this just occurred to me. I just saw in New York, NPs now get to practice independently, and so you can see this, it's happening, it's changing. So another— that's hopeful. You know, and I think it's because we're at such a breaking point. It's like, you know, whatever the chains were, it's like it doesn't matter. We need these professionals and they know what they're doing. And they're oftentimes— I mean, I will tell you, I have known some nurse anesthetists who are cream of the crop, like ballers.

Ballers.

Yeah, exactly.

Absolutely. I mean, that's really great news. Um, you know, in 2015, I was here in New York taking contract as a travel nurse I worked with 4 NPs who are still bedside, and I thought to myself, why would you become an NP if you knew you wouldn't be able to independently practice? And they were like, well, we were promised that we would be, and look how many years it took for that to happen. Which, it's good it happened, but I mean, this is, this is also another big gap with education, is we have all these programs that tell us We'll get these jobs, but those jobs don't exist in some of these programs. So we also need education on the viable programs that are out there because we have a lot of pop-up, you know, schools out there trying to sell degrees. And that's another big problem for educators like myself. Yeah. So, you know, we, we have a lot of work to do, but it can be fun. You—

we have—

you ladies have a great time. You've had a great time. I have a great time with the work that I do. You know, we put in the hours, we put in the sweat, the blood, and the tears sometimes, but it's our own.

Yep.

Yes, sir.

That's it.

It's our way.

It's our own. And that's kind of brings it back full circle.

What we're really saying, it's actually—

was such a relief.

Yeah, it was huge.

The news is it's all your fault.

I love it.

It's usually my fault anyway, but now it really is my fault.

And you get to own it, which is great.

That's it, right? Awesome. Yeah, thank you so much, Antrea and Karen, for being on the show today. I really had a great time speaking with you. I think, you know, let's keep putting our heads together, let's keep rallying nurses because we really do have the power to take back our profession and make it what we want. And, um, I look forward to seeing you guys in the near future.

Well, yeah, we want to have you over our house. House. Yeah, virtual.

Absolutely. Yeah. And then, um, I mentioned NNBA. Are you ladies by chance making it this year in July?

Oh gosh, I keep forgetting. Yes, we've looked at that. We've looked at a couple of them and we're like, we gotta get to a conference because we'll just— there'll be a firehose of—

so I know July is right around the corner. I know, probably too late at this point for you.

For you, it's in Vegas, right?

It is in Vegas.

No, I plan my life in 6-hour blocks. That's not—

oh, oh, perfect. So it's 21st, 22nd, 22nd, 23rd, that weekend of July.

So, okay, Karen, I will get on that. I'll look at that.

Yeah.

Okay, get off.

Just tell me where to go.

Yeah. And if you do register for the event, just say I sent you.

Okay. Okay.

Damion Jenkins sent you. Michelle Podlesny, the president, she keeps trying to give me a referral fee. I keep pretending like I don't know how to collect that referral fee because I'm not about that. I just want people to go. It's an amazing experience. You're going to meet a lot of like-minded individuals.

Yeah, I've been. Yeah.

Oh, you have been?

When did you go?

I haven't. Uh, 3 years ago.

Yeah, perfect.

Yeah, I haven't been. I'd love to go.

So I was there.

I was on a panel for patient advocacy.

Oh, perfect. Yeah, I was there 3 years ago as well.

Is that the last time they had it?

No, they've had it virtual the last 2 years, and we're meeting in person again this year, so Yeah, Vegas, man, right where rebel nurses are probably— maybe we'll get to meet in person.

Yeah, well, I'll keep— I'll reach out to you afterwards and we'll, we'll, we'll connect.

Yes, I'm in LA, so I just drive over there.

And you know what, I've never been to LA.

Well, you could come to my house after.

I need a reason to come that way.

You can. I just moved and I'm having a she shed built in my backyard.

Oh my God, how amazing! Awesome. Well, thanks again for being on the Nursing Strategies for Success podcast. We'll be in touch soon. Take care.

Bye.

Bye.

Bye.

And that concludes episode 12 of season 2 of the Nursing Strategies for Success podcast with this week's guests, Antra Boyd and Karen DeMarco. All of the ways to connect with Antra and Karen will be included in the show notes of this episode. We hope that everything that we covered in today's episode will inspire, empower, and lead you to align with the career that you desire and deserve. As always, if you have any questions about anything that we covered in this episode, please visit thenursespeak.com/contact and get in touch with me. I would love to have a discussion with you. So until next episode, take care, be well, and remember that nurses can do anything.