2021 Health Care Champions Nurse: Claire Dale

Health care in the Ozarks differs greatly depending on the region it’s practiced in, according to Claire Dale, a nurse who is director of the intensive care unit/telemetry at Citizens Memorial Hospital.

“For me, I practice in a rural area, so my focus is often on population health and the effect that low socioeconomic status and low health literacy play on the overall health of our patients,” she says.

Dale says part of her role as a leader in her organization is to identify trends that cause patients to return to the hospital and find creative ways to help them control their own health.

“As a bedside nurse, I focus more on the individual patient needs, how they learn and the barriers they have within their own lives,” she says. “Being in rural health allows me to build relationships with patients we see more than once and helps me to understand what they need to be as healthy as possible and an advocate for themselves and offer resources that will be most helpful for them.”

Since she joined CMH in September 2016, Dale says the hospital’s critical care capability has increased greatly.

“Over the last four years, we have gone from transferring the majority of our critical patients to tertiary care centers to only shipping patients that need specialty services we do not provide,” she says. “With the critical care experience I brought from my previous bedside position, I was able to train and teach our ICU nurses to take care of much sicker patients than before.”

These include ventilated patients, patients on critical medications and unstable patients who would have been transferred in the past.

“I have been able to build great working relationships with the physicians here at the hospital, which allowed them to trust the nurses to provide critical care we weren’t able to before,” Dale says. “I am always looking for new services we could implement at CMH to allow our local patients to stay close instead of having to go to an outside center.”

Dale says COVID-19 changed everything in health care.

“I believe that health care has been forever changed by the pandemic, and the goal now is to find our ‘new normal,’” she says. “I am blessed to work for an organization that put the safety of our employees and patients above all since the beginning of the pandemic.”

In the ICU, Dale has overseen the implementation of an individualized visitation policy where each patient’s needs are considered. Visitation ranges from window visits to digital visits to sitting with patients in their final hours.

“I’m a firm believer that emotional health plays a role in healing physically, and it is our responsibility to care for both,” she says.

COVID-19 also has provided Dale with what she calls her proudest professional accomplishment: working with her ICU/telemetry team to provide professional, empathetic and strong patient care throughout the pandemic.

“Since the very beginning of the pandemic, my staff have stepped up, accepted the challenge, provided excellent care and improved their clinical skills with grace, positivity and an eagerness to help those around them,” she says.