What it Takes to Build a Consortium

Hi everyone and welcome to the Exactly podcast. My name is Brooke Macintosh and I'll be your host today. And this is an episode that I am particularly excited about. Uh today we're going to dive into the story and how these two incredible leaders that we have on the podcast with us today. Laura Smith, who is the nursing placement coordinator at Johns Hopkins Hospital, and Lorie Harris, who is the director of student placements at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, how they came together to really help create kind of the first of its kind collaborative in the Maryland um and DC space for nursing schools and clinical partners to come together to really tackle clinical placements. Um so like I said together they've brought you know a lot of hospitals um even you know some outpatient facilities lots of nursing uh programs and you know some of their allied partners as well um together into one big connected network uh that's really been built off of shared goals and communication and and truly I've you know had the opportunity of seeing like the innovation that this group you know

has really brought forward in the in the nursing realm. So today we're going to talk about how this all came to be. Um you know what they've accomplished so far. Any advice that they have, you know, for others who are, you know, looking to jump into a collaborative uh together or, you know, maybe they're a little scared. They're kind of thinking of this on on the outskirts. Um but let's jump in. Lori and Laura, thank you so much for being here.

Yeah. Thanks for having us. This is fun and exciting. Thank you. Yeah. So let's jump in. Let's let's start. Let's go all the way back to the beginning. So how did this idea for a collaborative in your area first come to life?

So we um started kind of all discussing the work in silos, right? Like I would have a conversation with an academic partner as a being on the hospital side and we would say like well this other hospital does it this way and then this hospital does it this way and I kept just scratching my head being like why do we do it this way and this is weird.

Yeah that is weird. I don't know why they make you do that. Um, and so I had that conversation a lot and I had it with all all of the schools that I worked with. And then I realized I also didn't know my counterparts at any hospital. I was like I didn't know who was doing my work at yeah their local hospital or who was helping to place the students. So I was like curious about that. I was curious if we did this things the same or why couldn't we do things the same. And so I just became really curious and then the work is frustrating, right? So became and it's not an easy job.

We became frustrated. And so the more and more we had that conversation um we just were like okay what can we do? Can we do anything? And around that same time is when Lori reached out and and identified that there was some struggles with the current process that we had in place and her and that was between the program that Lori worked at and your hospital. All of Well, it was like with the vendor all of them. Okay. Yeah.