Unlike most medical professionals, Bloom Healthcare Nurse Practitioner Chelsea Goston makes house calls. The visits let her really get to know her patients, see how they live, and create successful healthcare plans.
“A lot of patients are really, truly homebound and can't get out to, like, see a cardiologist or get their blood drawn, and so you kind of have to definitely a lot of collaboration, creativity, and just really trying to find what works best for them," Goston says.
Chelsea knew she wanted to work in home healthcare because before she graduated from the University of Colorado College of Nursing, she interned at Bloom.
COMPACT stands for Community Optimized Mentoring for Practice Accelerated Transitioning. An innovative partnership between the provider and Goston's alma mater offers students hands-on experience and a job interview.
Bloom has hired six CU Nursing grads. Chelsea was the first.
“I felt like I really knew the team, knew the system knew, like the flow of the every day, like work processes. So, I was able to just kind of not worry about those things and truly focus more on the nursing care, like diagnosing treatment aspect of it," she says. "I do think it did make me a better nurse practitioner, and gave me a good, solid starting point.”
It's trial by hire.
Advanced practice nurses studying adult gerontology can apply to do their clinicals at Bloom Healthcare for two semesters.
“They have a taste of what our practice really is like. So, I think they kind of know the benefits that they see all the support, but they also see the challenges of working with this population that are frail and high risk," Bloom Healthcare Director of Clinical Development Megan Graeser, GNP, DNP, says.
Megan Graeser, also a CU Nursing grad, runs COMPACT.
“They kind of know what they're getting into, and they have a little bit of training underneath their belt, so it's not as hard for them to hopefully make that transition because they spent time in our practice already and kind of see what we do," she says. "The other piece is those compact students get exposed to our EMR, our electronic medical record. So they are also used to doing some charting, things like that. That's another big hurdle, I think, for new providers, is figuring out, how do I do my charting, how do I do my documentation? And that hopefully eases that a little bit, because they've already been exposed to that.”
Knowing whether the student is a good fit is critical because the costs to hire and train a new nurse practitioner can top $45,000. The program benefits the provider, patients, students, and CU Nursing.
“It means that the cost of orienting a new graduate goes down. It means that the student is able, as a graduate, to be able to engage in the health care and delivery of healthcare to deliver RVUs quicker," CU Nursing Assistant Professor Kim Paxton, DNP, APRN, says.
In the program, students also learn how to transition from being a bedside nurse taking orders to being in charge and giving the orders.
“So being a registered nurse and moving into a nurse practitioner role is a complete mindset shift," Paxton says. "As a registered nurse, I critically think, and I assess and I make evaluations, and I make determinations. And then I typically would move that over to a provider of medical physicians, a PA, a nurse practitioner like I'm becoming. But as the nurse practitioner, I need to make those decisions.”
COMPACT also offers students like Goston a smooth path from graduation to a career.
"I still love it. I’m still here. It's a whole new world from what I was used to in the hospital, but very rewarding. It is hard work and challenging, but definitely worth it," she says.
