Graduate Maggie Hofmann began a new role at Mayo Clinic during her last year of the IHH DNP program. Below, Maggie describes her role as an integrative oncology nurse at Mayo Clinic.
“I work in the outpatient setting as a RN care coordinator in the Integrative Oncology Clinic. As of now it is myself and a MD, but we are discussing adding other integrative clinicians to our team. Since I am not an APRN I am functioning under my RN license. The provider I work with does all the initial consults and I do some of the follow up and see cancer patients for separate appointments related to symptom management. I see patients three days a week and the services/topics we discuss in the appointments include the following:
- Integrative symptom management ( pain, nausea, anxiety, neuropathy, insomnia)
- Mindfulness practices
- Nutrition and movement
- Reiki
- Acupressure
- Aromatherapy
- Hand massage
I started teaching a patient education class called “healthy living while on cancer treatment” that I created with my provider to offer more of an introductory class patients can attend before their initial consult visit. We have been doing a lot of staff wellness offerings as well. Another nurse and I will offer drop in staff wellness sessions over the lunch hour. With graduation on the horizon I have began to discuss the development of my role with my leadership team to include more of the leadership focus into my FTE (time to focus on updating/creating policies, improving staff education around integrative nursing, system wide staff well, etc.) and well as the possibility of seeing inpatient cancer patients.
I think the beauty of our degree is that there are so many possibilities of what you could do with a doctoral degree focused on integrative health. There is a level of uncertainty now with what you will be doing, but the opportunities will exist to use your education in many ways aside from being a nurse practitioner. Through this program specifically you will have the opportunity to become Reiki trained as many of us have. You take one health coaching course through the program, but I know many graduates continue on to get their health coaching certificate after graduation and have a role as a health coach or very similar to one. I see myself getting my health coaching certificate in the future as well. I think how you use this degree depends on what you feel called to do and how you would like to care for people in the future. When I started the program I was interested in adding on the dual NP program, but realized that the model of care I wanted to provide and saw myself working in aligned best with the IHH program. I think about it this way, if you chose to get your DNP focused on integrative health and healing you're becoming educated at the expert level of how to provide integrative nursing and embed integrative nursing into systems, you are diving into the integrative nursing/health deep end. If you were to get your NP in adult gero for example and then obtain a holistic nurse certification you would be standing in the shallow end with only your ankles wet in terms of integrative nursing/health knowledge and would be prepared to provide care in a slightly different way. There is no right or wrong answer, it is all dependent on what you would like to do with your nursing career.”