Urology nurse practitioner discusses collaboration with the care team

In this video, Emily Sopko, CNP, shares how she collaborates with other professionals in the urology department. Sopko is a nurse practitioner with University Hospitals Urology Institute in Cleveland, Ohio.

Transcription:

How do you collaborate with other members of the health care team, such as urologists, surgeons, and other nurses, in the urology department?

I love that part of my job. It's probably my favorite part. I like working alongside the residents, because they've taught me pretty much everything that I know about urology. The 8 years that I've been doing this, it's constantly seeing something new come along, but it's also great to be able to start to be able to teach the next generation as well. That group is who I work with the most often. I mentioned we have the 2 inpatient APPs as well, but generally the other APPs in our group are outpatient, so I don't see them as often. However, we work really well together. We're a very collaborative team, and I really appreciate that.

For my day to day, I actually grew up being a bedside nurse on the floor that our patients go to. So I took care of urology patients postoperatively as a bedside nurse, which is part of why I felt like it would be a good fit for me as a nurse practitioner. So being able to be a good liaison between the medical providers, the residents, and the attendings and what the bedside nurse knows and sees every single day, I'm in a really unique position there to be able to translate from 1 side to the other, vice versa. I think that's part of the thing that I really enjoy about my job the most, because sometimes those 2 parties cannot see what the other person's trying to say, but all it takes is someone to mediate that sometimes to make the communication factor go a lot smoother.

And in terms of working with our attendings, the greatest part about the institution that I work in, the department that I work in, we have a chairman who's really a visionary about how APPs are independent within the department, how they interact with the attendings that are part of faculty. The faculty is very respectful of what an APP can do. For the most part, they trust us. They train us so we do things the way they want us to do. And we have a really good collaborative relationship, because we have a good trust system in place. I'm happy with how the department has been developed over the time that I've been here. It's always been welcoming, as far as I know. But I feel like it just gets stronger, and then throughout the hospital, because I've been here for a while in this role, I think I've made a good name for what the APPs can do with urology, how we can interact with all the different surgical specialties or medical specialties in the hospital, education for the nursing staff about things like how to place a coudé catheter, which you might not learn how to do in nursing school, how to irrigate a bladder to remove big blood clots in a person who's got a really bloody prostate or something going on in their bladder. It's another nice piece that I get to bring to the table is I can offer in-services to the different nursing units or different hospitals within our system. And I really appreciate being part of a bigger picture team where it's not just me coming to work every single day, working with the same group of people on the same patients every single day. There's always a new challenge waiting for me around the corner and kind of making a name for urology in general and nurse practitioners and PAs as well.

This transcript was edited for clarity.