A new lane for nursing leadership

If Johanna Gaskins needed affirmation of her career path during her Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) program at the University of Minnesota, it came with all the subtlety of an F4 tornado.

“I wound up in the hospital with a bilateral pulmonary embolism,” Gaskins, DNP ‘16, APRN, AGNP-C, recalls.

“I was hospitalized for four days; I was on oxygen and on a heparin drip. And I was completing my statistics exam in the hospital, because — this is so sad — I was like, I am not dying until I have an A on this exam.” At the same time, she knew that her hard-charging approach to work and life, shared by so many nurses, was causing many of her colleagues to get sick and burn out.

“I was very fit, very active. I was a runner. I didn’t smoke. I didn’t have any chronic diseases,” Gaskins says. But the Virginia nurse and mom knew that self-neglect and constant stress played big roles in her health crisis. “I was 41 at the time, I had young kids. It really did shift my awareness around what was important.

“You look around and ask, if today is your last day, are you really doing the work that’s important to you?”

That was in 2014. Today, she answers that question with an emphatic yes: Gaskins is the founder and CEO of Seek Wellbeing Wellness & Medical Housecalls, an integrative health practice. Seek Wellbeing prioritizes preventive care, root causes and actively planning to reach each client’s individual wellness goals.

Looking at the whole person

“At the core is an understanding that human beings are whole people,” she says. “The brand is a statement and a way of living.” The DNP program helped equip Gaskins with the tools to build something different: a structure that combines traditional medicine with health coaching and what she calls the clinical wellness and wellbeing model of care. The model recognizes that “we are inseparable from our environment,” Gaskins explains.

“It’s person-centered and relationship based. It recognizes that relationships matter. That nature and environment influence health. That wellbeing isn’t just physical; it’s emotional, social, and spiritual,” she says. Seek Wellbeing nurses and clients partner on a comprehensive health evaluation. Based on that assessment, they create an individualized wellness plan and meet monthly to assess progress and, if needed, to recalibrate.

“We meet people where they are: It’s person-centered and relationship-based. And I like to frame things in a context where they matter to the person,” Gaskins says. “I’ve cooked in people’s homes. You ask, how does this taste to you? Well guess what? I didn’t put any inflammation-causing ingredients in it. And you can make it, too.”

Gaskins traces the very beginning of her integrative health journey to encountering aromatherapy on a retreat in 2012. She chose the DNP program in Minnesota — even though at the time, she wasn’t entirely sure what a DNP was. “I was really trying to understand how I could be more of a nurse; how I could go deeper into the nursing profession,” Gaskins remembers.

She was drawn to the School of Nursing by the integrative health and healing track, and everything she read about Professor Mary Jo Kreitzer, PhD, RN, FAAN, and the Center for Spirituality and Healing “completely aligned.” It was the right move, priming Gaskins to create Seek Wellbeing in 2019.

‘The possibilities are endless’

“I look at the DNP as an implementation science degree,” the nurse-entrepreneur says.

And the wellbeing that Gaskins promotes through Seek Wellbeing? It’s supported for — and modeled by — the company’s nurse employees and franchisees. “When you’re not constantly bombarded and in burnout mode, the possibilities are endless,” Gaskins says. “I’ve tried to remove a lot of the things that kind of plague nurses, that bombard us and put us in survival mode, by weaving wellbeing into the culture of everything we do.

“In the health care system, we’re often just reacting. We can do better. I want nurses to be respected and be able to keep doing good work without feeling just mentally and emotionally drained. And always relying solely on resilience,” she says.

Gaskins built Seek Wellbeing as a franchise model under the parent company Seek Wellbeing Franchise LLC. Her intent is to “put nurses and nurse practitioners in ownership,” she says. “Because what nurses are worth? They have no idea. There is a lane for us where we can be respected and live life purposefully, out of burnout mode, and do the good work we were trained to do.”