I am a nurse. I am a nurse. I’m a nurse. Nurse. Team member. Lifesaver. A friend. An innovator. A student. Family. A voice for my patients. Role model. Advocate. Critical thinker. A people person. A listener. Hero. I am a nurse. My name is Heather Morath. I work in inpatient psychiatry at our College Hill location and I serve primarily kids from age 2-11 there. I went to school for business, graduated, worked for a family company and low-income and Section 8 housing property management. I began to kind of think, what could I do that would allow me to use some of the skills that I learned in business, but also allow me to do more interactions with families. I wanted to help families of children with special needs. So business to nursing seems like a really big jump, but to me it was a leap of faith, knowing that that was one way that I was going to actualize what I wanted to do with my life. I took a little bit of time in between my careers and then went back to school in an accelerated program. When you start out as a nurse, you know, you want to save the world, right? And you realize very quickly that you have to figure out what you can actually accomplish. Some days it might be something gigantic and some days it might be as simple as a little gesture, a caring gesture, some kind of relationship building that you do with a family that really helps them feel like their situation is normalized. We celebrate every little accomplishment in psychiatry and we should. And we celebrate not only with the patient and family, but with each other as a team. We do everything in a group setting in psychiatry and we all have our individual role and scope clearly, but if we don’t have the support of our team members, our mental health specialists, or our social workers we can’t accomplish what we want to accomplish. Nursing is a profession. There’s a lot of different avenues you can take within a hospital from direct care bedside nursing to information systems, to employee health, all of which you can learn a great deal from. Pretty soon after I started here at Children’s, I got involved in our shared governance structure, which really gives direct care clinicians a voice at the table with our operations members here at Children’s. That’s been a great experience. I feel like working here has given me perspective on life. It’s given me perspective as a mom. I think that perspective has made me a better nurse because I realize that when a family is going through something hard and another family is going through an even harder challenge that every family’s challenge is their challenge. So we have to acknowledge that and meet that family where they are and help them through that challenge. I think Cincinnati Children’s nurses are passionate. They’re big-hearted. I think that they are here because they want to be here. They want to help these kids and these families and they want to be a tool. They want to be a resource, some way to make a difference. My name is Heather and I’m a nurse.