Rebecca Love never planned to become a nurse. Or a senior manager.
Love was accepted to law school, but her mother told her, “We have a lot of good lawyers in the world.” We don’t have enough competent nurses.
So Love agreed to apply to nursing school to please her mother, Northeastern.
“I always hoped to make a positive impact on the world,” says Love, who holds a master’s degree in nursing from Northeastern. “Traditionally, I hadn’t thought of nursing as the path to get there. Being accepted to Northeastern and becoming a nurse changed my entire life.
Nursing then launched her into the business world.
As a nurse, Love founded HireNurses.com and served as its director in 2013. The website connects nurses to career opportunities that fit their schedule, experience and salary expectations. The company was acquired by Ryalto in March 2018.
About 10 years after earning her nursing degree from Northeastern, Love served as director of nursing innovation and entrepreneurship at the university from 2016-2018.
Love is now the clinical director of IntelyCarean online service that provides qualified nurses to fill positions in post-acute healthcare settings.
She is also an author and passionate advocate for the nursing profession.
“She’s amazing,” says Julie Norton, Northeastern’s director of academic ceremonies, who worked with Love when she was a senior development officer at the Bouve College of Health Sciences. “Extraordinary in terms of nursing innovation. »
Norton observed how Love arrived with little knowledge of how to run a business and became a national figure.
“I always found she was willing to talk to a nurse about what was going on or about starting a business,” Norton says. “She is a shining example of what Northeastern (stands for) — entrepreneurial, entrepreneurial, nurse extraordinaire — which then morphed into that when she speaks, people listen.”
Prior to working at Northeastern, Love held various nursing positions in local long-term care facilities and hospitals. At the time, Love couldn’t even imagine that a nurse could become an executive in corporate America.
“Whoever thought it was possible,” Love said. “I was just thinking about the role of bedside nurses.”
The idea of having nurses become innovators didn’t fully take hold until 2015, when her company HireNurses.com was struggling. A friend suggested she participate in a hackathon, an event in which a large number of people come together to participate in collaborative computer programming.
In the room, Love realized she was the only nurse inside and began to entertain the idea of having one entirely for nurses.
So, she connected with the teacher Nancy Hanrahan at Northeastern University, who advised her to organize the first hackathon just for nurses.
The event was sold out. All hospitals were present.
Subsequently, the group built the nation’s first nursing innovation program, launched in 2016. The program enabled nurses to combine their experience at the bedside with the creation of new businesses and inventions in the workplace.
“And we changed the world in 2017 when Johnson & Johnson discovered the program and decided to evolve its 15-year campaign from recognizing and thanking nurses for their service to recognizing nursing innovation like before -guarding the future of their campaign,” says Love.
“It was a big deal,” Love says.
For the first time in three or four decades, nurses began to see themselves differently, as a profession that could be more than what others defined, Love says.
They do have a stronger voice, but we’re going to need stronger voices in nursing to be able to move this forward.
Rebecca Love, Northeastern graduate and clinical director of IntelyCare
Nurses are frontline providers and have been innovating since Florence Nightingale, says Maria van Pelt, clinical professor at the Northeastern School of Nursing who worked with Love during her years at the school.
“As frontline providers, we are constantly developing innovative solutions to address many of the health care challenges we face in our daily practice,” says Pelt. “I believe innovative solutions are ways to provide our patients with the best, optimal care. I think that’s a really important role of nursing.
What stands out most about Love is his thought leadership and impact on the global health care community, Pelt says.
“It motivates people around the world to implement positive change,” says Pelt. “It gives them power.”
Love would have left the profession like so many others if she had never discovered the power of innovation.
According to the National Institute of Health, the nursing profession continues to face shortages due to a lack of potential educators, high staff turnover and inequitable distribution of the workforce.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that more than 275,000 additional nurses will be needed between 2020 and 2030. Nurse burnout remains a problem, according to the NIH. The national average for turnover rates is 8.8% to 37%, depending on geographic location and nursing specialty.
Nurses are struggling, Love said.
In the midst of the pandemic, Love received a phone call from David Coppins, CEO of IntelyCare. Coppins caught Love on a particularly bad day.
Coppins told Love he was developing his board and needed help. In response, Love told her the problem with staffing agencies and all hospitals and health systems is that they treat nurses like commodities.
“You treat them like they’re an inexhaustible supply of a 24-piece set, a cog for a 24/7 need, and they have no value,” Love explains. “This is how you treat us, and I don’t care if we’re in the middle of a pandemic. The truth is, you are no different than hospital systems that employ nurses today.
Coppins hung up. But 24 hours later, he called Love back, asking for a different conversation, admitting that Love was right.
He asked Love to join us as a voice for nurses within the organization and ensure the company develops and invests in solutions to support the nursing profession so that they are better.
Love decided to join the company to help make long-term care facilities successful.
In nursing, there’s a mentality that if a nurse makes a mistake, they’re fired, Love says. But often, these errors occur because nurses are not trained for these settings. IntelyCare works to address this problem by providing qualifications, clinical quality, and training to potential remote workers.
Love says this method allows the company to train and retain nurses instead of laying them off.
At Northeastern’s Innovation Program, Love learned that she could redefine what a profession looks like and that nurses can reach different career levels than they have ever reached before.
“If you look at nurses who are my grandmother’s age, then nurses my mother’s age, then nurses our age, there’s been a dramatic shift in where these nurses can sit down,” Love said. “They do have a bigger voice, but we’re going to need stronger voices in nursing to be able to move this forward. »
Beth Treffeisen is a reporter at Northeastern Global News. Send him an email to b.treffeisen@northeastern.edu. Follow her on Twitter @beth_treffeisen.
