Juliette Latham-Meadows, RN, CCRN, went to Piedmont Atlanta’s annual nursing certification day breakfast this year as usual. But it was not a usual day for this charge nurse in the PACU. “I was surprised to receive a certificate and a pin from the AACN [American Association of Colleges of Nursing] for having maintained my CCRN (adult, pediatric and neonatal critical care nurse) certification for 20 years,” said Latham-Meadows. She was one of only 1,127 nurses nationally to achieve that distinction this year.
While the applause and the recognition were nice, the real reward has been the knowledge that she has become the calm, knowledgeable nurse leader she always wanted to be. Nursing was all Latham-Meadows ever wanted to do growing up in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and later in Canada where her parents moved to give their family a better life. “My grandfather always said, ‘you’re going to be a nurse,’ and I believed in him,” she said.
She graduated from nursing school in Toronto, Canada in 1980 and practiced med-surge, intensive care and post-anesthesia nursing in Canada, Saudi Arabia and California before moving to Atlanta and joining Piedmont Atlanta in 1996.
“I earned my CCRN certification in California. The hospital there encouraged all nurses to be certified,” she said. “I knew that working in critical care required advanced, higher level nursing skills and I wanted to be at the top of my profession,” said Latham-Meadows. “No matter what type of patient or condition came my way, I wanted to be able to handle it. I always wanted to be in the know.”
According to the AACN, certification validates a nurse’s clinical expertise and commitment to the highest standards of practice and to lifelong learning.
“Oh gosh, the exam was so hard. I really had to study, but I used the materials and tapes put out by Laura Gasparis. Those are still good study materials,” she said. “I missed passing the first time by three points, but I made it the second time.” She earned the CCRN credential in 1993.
When she moved to Atlanta, Piedmont Hospital offered her jobs in intensive care or recovery. Although she had been worked in critical care for ten years, she the PACU position, because it was on the day shift and worked better with her roles as wife and mother.
“People think that all we do is wake people up, but we have to be prepared for anything and everything post-anesthesia in the recovery room,” she said. “Patients may have high or low blood pressure or other complications, and the airway is always an issue,” she said. “No matter the condition, our job is to stabilize the patient.”
Latham-Meadows believes that having critical care experience and certification are a help in the recovery room. She encourages all nurses to be become certified in their specialty. Many of her team hold the CPAN (perianesthesia nurse certification).
“As the leader on the unit, I always felt it was important to keep up my certification, because things are always changing and we do a lot of trouble-shooting. You never know when you are going to need to explain how to do something to a staff member,” she said. It takes 100 hours of continuing education every three years to be re-certified as CCRN. Latham-Meadows recently took an all-day class on LVAD (left ventricular assist device) surgeries, because she’s seen more of those patients come through the recovery room in the last two years. “There is always new information to learn and I try to pick up on everything I can,” she said.
Has certification made a difference in her career? “Absolutely,” she said. “Honestly, I’m a lot more confident as a nurse. I’m able to stay calm and not get flustered. When people ask me questions, I’ve an advanced body of knowledge to draw on, and in a CODE situation, I know what to do.” Recently a patient came from surgery with a balloon pump. “We don’t usually take those in this unit, and our nurses aren’t trained for it, but I told them to stay calm, that I knew we could do this. Let’s get him hooked up and stable, and we did,” she said. “Sometimes your job is to smooth things out,”
Other workers may go home at night and wonder why they did or didn’t do something, but not Latham-Meadows. “I go home and think that I did my job,” she said. “I know I helped someone.”
