I'm Stephanie Abou, and as a member of the Executive Committee for the Academy of Neonatal Nursing, I have the honor of speaking with and congratulating our latest inductee into the Neonatal Hall of Fame, Susan Blackburn. Susan, welcome and congratulations. Thank you, Stephanie.
I am pleased and really honored to be selected to be inducted into the Neonatal Hall of Fame, and thank the Academy for choosing me. And I'm looking forward to talking with you today. I'm sorry I'm not able to attend the meeting in San Diego. We would have loved to met with you in person, but are grateful for your time today so that we can honor your contribution to nursing and to get to know you and your career better.
I wanted to start the conversation with really knowing what inspired you to become a nurse. That's a good question. And it's one that I don't know the answer to. As long as I can remember, I wanted to become a nurse.
And I knew I wanted to be a pediatric nurse. And I asked my family and they said, well, yeah, you always wanted to be a nurse. So I don't know what it was that turned me that way. I don't know if it was, you know, working as a babysitter and as a nanny. maybe got me interested in kids and doing that.
But I wanted to go into pediatric nursing, I knew that. The interesting thing is that when I finished my bachelor's, my first job was at New York Hospital in New York City in their pediatric building. And they put me in the NICU my first day at work, and I never left because I just loved that.
And that was that was That was my focus forever. That's perfect. It sounds like the career chose you instead of you necessarily choosing the career. That's wonderful. Was there a particular person in your journey that had a great impact on your career?
And how did they impact you, if so? I think the person that probably had the biggest impact in my career was Dr. Catherine Barnard. Kathy was a nurse that did a lot of work.
She was a colleague of Brazelton, and she did a lot of early work in looking at early parent-infant relationships, infant sleep patterns, infant behaviors. And Steve was my advisor when I went to graduate school. I worked in New York, and then I reached the point where I realized I needed more education.
do what I wanted to do. So I decided if I was going to, you know, leave and go to school, I should try a different part of the country to see. And I actually applied to a couple places and I got my final choice down to University of Washington and University of California, San Francisco, and really couldn't decide between the two of them.
So I actually flipped a coin. and it came up Washington. That's fantastic. Again, a stroke of luck and chosen for you.
That's fantastic. I ended up in Seattle and I never left. I was only going to go for a year and go back to New York and I just I love the University of Washington.
I love the environment of Seattle and actually gradually my parents and both my sisters and their families also. moved to the Seattle area. You had quite the influence then.
And so that's where you began your journey as an educator? I first was, well, I went to McMaster's program and then my advisor was Catherine Barnard. And she really, she really mentored me in so many ways in terms of professional roles. But one of the biggest things, I think, is that because she was doing work on early infant behavior, this was before we had developmentally supportive care, before we were even looking at infant cues or thinking about infant cues. And so although she started out working primarily with term babies, but then, you know, in some of her research, moved on to premature babies.
And so she just opened me. to the whole idea that These babies can talk to us by their behavior. They can show us what they're feeling. They can show us when they're doing well. They can show us when they're having problems in terms of tolerance. And so that was such a big difference.
And it was particularly, it was interesting because when I started in the NICU in the mid-60s, we didn't let parents into the unit. with their sick babies. They could look through a window at their sick babies, but they could not come in.
They could not touch their babies. They could not hold their babies. And they could not hold their babies until their babies were moved into the grower and gainer areas and, you know, all on bottle feedings and getting ready. And about within a year after I started, they actually changed and opened up the whole unit.
And one of the interesting things about that is They opened up the unit so parents could come into any room. There were a whole line of parents that day when it happened and not a lot of nurses because we were petrified in terms of you know working with parents with these critically ill babies. That didn't last very long but it was just sort of a momentary whoa what are we going to do now. I imagine that was such a big change all at once.
They were your babies. And then you had to figure out how to partner with these families to keep them safe, but to also invite the families into the care. Originally, I think we still, it was a transition from thinking of them as our babies to us working in collaboration with parents and that we really were. the parents and the staff were really part of the same team and that by working together we could actually provide better care for these babies and be more sensitive to what these babies were telling us. The other things so so so Kathy really sort of started me on that and and allowed me to be involved in the whole transition to developmentally supportive care from the very beginning.
So that was really exciting to see how that evolved and how that changed. The other things that Kathy did for me as a mentor is she was always supportive, but she was always challenging me to think further, to come up with new ideas. If I had an issue, it was telling me to figure out, okay, how do you evaluate this?
How do you solve it? When I was finished with my master's program and starting to think about a job, she basically said to me, you know you're going on for your doctorate. And I said, well, okay.
But she also then hired me on a research project she had just gotten funded to coordinate all of the inpatient data collection and intervention. So that was really my first experience. learning how to do research and dealing with the practicalities of doing research in intensive care nursery and interacting both with babies, but also we also did home visits with the babies and their families.
So that was a wonderful introduction into research with an expert mentor. And then later on, she helped me in terms, as I was writing research grants, she helped me in terms of just writing in general, in terms of providing me feedback on some of my early work when I wasn't sure that I should actually be writing, that I was really qualified. She also got me involved with the March of Dimes.
And the March of Times at that point was developing some nursing education modules. So I was able to get involved in writing some of those nursing education modules, doing some online materials for parents on infant behavior. and actually I'm still a part of the National March of Dimes Nurse Advisory Committee, a nurse advisory council, so I've stayed involved with the with the March of Dimes.
for all those years. And then the other thing that happened is that she knew that the March of Dimes was funding some of the early neonatal nurse clinician programs. And so we worked to apply for that. And we were funded for one of those early neonatal nurse clinicians. It was actually called perinatal nurse clinician.
We had a perinatal section and neonatal section. But as you know, the neonatal nurse clinician role then evolved into the neonatal nurse practitioner role. That's fantastic. And so that beginning in research and in writing and disseminating your work really put you on a journey to be a prolific author.
And you've continued to write, including the maternal, fetal and neonatal physiology, a clinical perspective. And I believe a latest edition just recently came out. Is that correct? It came out a few years ago.
It's the fifth edition. And that book actually arose because as a faculty, it was frustrating because I could not find any resources that talked about normal neonatal physiology. You know, occasionally you see a little bit as part of another article.
But. most articles were focused on pathophysiology and problems. And it seemed to me that if you really want to understand what's happening with these babies, and both when they're doing well, but also when they're running into problems, and why some issues are more common, why our drug therapy of these infants is so complicated, you really need to understand the basic physiology.
and the embryology and the genetics. And so for a neonatal nurse clinician program, I'd actually written some handouts, sort of trying to summarize some of that content. And then as I went to conferences and talked to other educators, all of them were sort of saying the same thing, is that there really was a need for this type of book. And so a colleague and I started.
and got a contract to write the book. And my colleague was involved in the first edition, but then it was no longer was at the time to do it the subsequent edition. So with the second edition, I took it over. Wow. So you saw the need and you really filled in the gap, which is amazing.
And then that resource was available for nurses like me to be able to use and didn't realize that there was a gap to fill. And we also made a decision when we developed the book that it would be maternal fetal, not just maternal fetal neonatal, not just neonatal. Because sort of my philosophy is that if you're going to be... taking care of the baby, you need to know what happened during pregnancy. And so much of what happens to the woman physiologically during pregnancy has implications for fetal development and also for the newborn.
And then vice versa, because my book has also been used by midwifery programs because of the pregnancy physiology. If you're in a perinatal nurse specialist or midwifery program, you need to know something about what happens with babies after birth. Absolutely.
And then I believe you are an editor, the editor for the Journal of Perinatal and Neonatal Nursing. Yes, I was originally on the editorial board and a reviewer for that journal. And then they had a perinatal editor and a neonatal editor. And when the neonatal editor decided to retire, I took over and became the neonatal editor. And so that was challenging in terms of finding articles and coming up with topics.
Because basically, we basically asked for articles. We didn't wait for people to submit. Or we put out a journal topic. And then nurses could submit based on that topic. I anticipate that's still a challenge.
It is. It was. And then eventually I decided I was ready to turn over the editor role to someone else. And then for many years after that, I wrote a column for the journal.
And I had two topics that I wrote. One on physiology, sort of going back to my love of physiology and implications of that. both in terms of, since it was perinatal, neonatal focused, sometimes neonatal, sometimes fetal, sometimes pregnancy.
And then in the last years, for the last couple of years, I did a column on internet resources because that's when they're saying they have a lot more resources available for nurses that could help clinically or as resources for parents or teaching resources. So I would highlight several resources in each issue of the journal. And that was really that was actually fun trying to find and try out different resources. That's fantastic. And so as you think about the journey that you've gone on and filling in the gap as you've seen resources were needed and to help really.
grow up and educate a generation of nurses, what words would you use to inspire the next generation of nurses? Before we get to that, I just want to mention one other thing that I had the opportunity to be involved with, and that was the National Surfication Corporation Neonatal Intensive Care Nursing Exam. I was chair of that test committee for many years, and it was a test that we were very proud of with our test committee because it had wonderful reliability statistics.
And it really did, and it continues to do well. And I was actually on, when NCC was thinking about starting a neonatal nurse practitioner exam, they pulled together the neonatal intensive care nursing committee, which I was not on at that point, and then a bunch of us educators who had been, and some practitioners who had been involved in some of the early development of the programs, of the NMP programs. And our nurse clinician program quickly transitioned into a master's NMP program.
And for, actually for many years, most of the NMPs in Washington, Oregon, and Alaska came out of our program. But then NCC, after they developed that great committee that came up with the plan for the NMP, they divided us into two different groups. And because I was not an NMP, I really felt more comfortable in the neonatal intensive care nursing. And that was a wonderful experience in terms of interacting with the other committee members, seeing what practices, you know, we would come up with a wonderful question, and then other people in the room would say, no, we don't do it that way. It's not part of our practice.
So, okay, how can we, how can we fix, how can we recreate this exam so that it'll meet the needs of nurses across the country? And I also learned a lot. about writing exam questions. I bet you did. And like you said, that continues to be a standard for specialty certification today.
Fantastic. So going back to your question about advice for the next generation of nurses, some of the things I think continuing to seek opportunities. to learn and grow, to keep on growing, to ask questions, because we really need to continue to ask why we're doing things, why do we do it like that, and then to look at is there a better way to do this, is there a better way to practice.
I think serving both finding a mentor particularly when you're young in your career, but even later, a mentor can be wonderful. And then serving as a mentor for other nurses. because that also can be very rewarding to see nurses that you've mentored go out into practice, supporting each other and recognizing that everybody has good days and not so good days, and providing that support for everyone on your team, collaborating with families and working together with families to develop. care of that their infant and supporting them as they take on more and more responsibility for the parenting role.
They get involved in activities whether they're unit-based activities, hospital-based activities, professional activities such as the academy or international activities particularly with the international group of neonatal nurses. And taking advantage of opportunities that are given to you to take on new challenges, to take on new roles, to take on new projects, because you never know where they're going to lead. That is very true. That has led you well, I believe, during your journey, for sure. And you ended up in places that I think you wouldn't have imagined at the beginning of your career.
One of my favorite quotes is actually from Katherine Graham. She used to be the publisher of the Washington Post. And this is, I changed it a little bit, but she said, to love what you do and feel that it makes a difference.
How could anything be more rewarding? She said, how could anything be more fun, which also fits. To love what you do and feel that it matters. How could anything be more rewarding?
Agreed. And I can't think of anyone else more rewarding or deserving for this recognition for the contribution you've made. I'll say personally, selfishly, thank you so much that you helped with all the resources that I've been able to access. grown in my career as a neonatal nurse.
And I'm so appreciative of your willingness to be open to the opportunities and to disseminate your work and to really share and fill in those gaps where the needs were so that we can continue to grow as a profession. Is there anything else that you would like to share with us today before we close out? No, just a final big thank you to the Academy.
So deserving. And I so enjoyed our time together today. I hope to get to spend some time with you in person one day.
So I congratulate you in person. But again, congratulations. And we are so glad to be able to honor your contribution in this way and appreciate you so much.
Thank you so much for your time.