Johns Hopkins Children's Center celebrates National Nurses Week, May 6-12. Recently, a few of its nurses described the values of honor, respect and family that keep them on the front lines of patient care at Johns Hopkins.

Pride in Hopkins Nursing: Support

Sara Fowler, R.N. , Child and Adolescent Psychiatry

I am proud to be a Johns Hopkins nurse. There is such a supportive community here. I first experienced it during orientation as a new nurse in 2012. You join a cohesive team of nurses, doctors and staff who communicate with one another and work together, all in the best interest of our patients. In Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, after hospitalization ends, community support begins. Our discharge plan, which nurses help devise, is critical to patients’ health, and can include everything from scheduled psychiatric care in the community to placement in a live-in facility. Child psychiatry is such challenging field. We chose it because we care so deeply about this very vulnerable population of kids, and want to be their advocates. I love the opportunity to plant a seed – a coping skill, a belief that things can change, that a brighter life beckons – and hope that down the road, someone waters it and helps it to grow.

Pride in Hopkins Nursing: Honor

Meghan D’Angelo, R.N., M.S.N. Harriet Lane Clinic

I’ve been at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center since receiving my degree from the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing 15 years ago. Here you have the best of everything: the best education, training, resources and colleagues. We nurses are able to provide our patients with excellent care, and we are encouraged to improve our standard of care and break new ground. While I’m proud to be a Hopkins nurse, I’m honored to be a part of my patients’ lives. Even when they are sick, children insist on having their childhood continue. That means having fun every day, despite the challenges of being in the hospital. They have so much to teach us about resilience and courage!

Pride in Hopkins Nursing: World View

Elizabeth Hall, R.N., Pediatric Clinical Research Unit (PCRU)

I love kids and have wanted to work with them even since I was one. I joined Johns Hopkins to learn from the best how to take care of children. It’s a source of pride to be a Johns Hopkins nurse, and to know we help transform children’s lives, and their families’, by returning healthy childhoods, or making them possible. Part of my unit conducts clinical research. So we see children from all over the world – from Turkey and Israel to Brazil and Russia. Their families bring them to our pediatric research unit at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center for cutting-edge treatments for life-threatening or debilitating diseases and conditions. We also care for children awaiting transplants. Nurses see the before and the after, the past and future, and safeguard the transitions.

Pride in Hopkins Nursing: Respect

Dana Hanks, R.N., Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU)

At Johns Hopkins, nurses are on the front lines of patient care. Because we get to know our little patients so well, and are with them throughout the day and night, we are acknowledged as doctors’ eyes and ears. They respect our judgments and assessments, which enables us as a group to provide the most informed, collaborative and comprehensive care possible. Every day, it seems we apply some new knowledge or procedure or new technology to give our children the best fighting chance for a future. The cutting-edge technology and research at Johns Hopkins is what enables us to help such sick newborns have a chance of survival. The power of Hopkins is a real source of pride, as is being able to say that I am a Hopkins nurse.

Michelle Kane, R.N., Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU)

In the pediatric intensive care unit at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, nurses see families in some of the most stressful times of their lives. It is during these difficult times that I have seen unparalleled strength in parents and families. The parents place a great deal of trust in you, as a nurse; trust that they can leave their child’s bedside – for a little sleep or to care for other children at home – because you will be here, taking care of their child. It is truly inspiring and an honor to provide that care. I’m constantly reminded of the difference nurses can make. At a place like Johns Hopkins, you are surrounded 24/7 by the most compassionate, exceptionally talented and devoted nurses anywhere. Everyone on this unit is at the top of his or her game, which speaks volumes of the training we have received here at Johns Hopkins. The nurse residency program has trained us beautifully in the exquisite minutia essential to good pediatric medicine.

Pride in Hopkins Nursing: Family

Mary O’Neill, R.N., Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU)

I love taking care of babies, and their families. We all do, here in nursing. In the NICU we have made a difference in the community, and in the state as a referral center for the sickest babies. Nurses here take tremendous pride in one another, in how we work as a team to help babies get well. If the NICU is to be their final stop on earth, we help them complete their life journeys. We’re all about love here. It’s why I love what I do. It’s why I’ve built my career at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, and what keeps me coming in any morning or night, for 31 years now, to see how my families are doing – my NICU families.