Carving Your Own Path in Nursing with Morgan Taylor

Starting a nursing career is both exciting and challenging, especially in the fast-paced world of healthcare. New nurses often struggle as they transition from school to real-world practice, navigating complex systems and high demands. How can we improve nursing education to better support them? In this episode, I speak with Morgan Taylor, Chief Nursing Officer at Archer Review. Morgan shares insights into the challenges new nurses face, the structural issues within nursing education, opportunities for innovation in healthcare, and ways to better align incentives in the field. Don’t miss out, listen now! --- Listen to the podcast here: Carving Your Own Path in Nursing with Morgan Taylor Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about the many different ways in which we can go about carving your own path because I think sometimes people think about any pursuit and they think about the most common manifestation of it and they think the most common manifestation of carving their own path as being something along the lines of either starting your own business or doing something really, really wild, like going and living off the grid somewhere in, I don’t know, Uganda, for the lack of a better place to think of, but there are plenty of different ways in which you can kind of discover where your path is going and discover how you can get to a place where you once again feel excited about the things that you once felt excited about. --- Today, my guest is Morgan Taylor and she is the chief nursing officer at Archer Review and chief nursing officer, I feel like a different C-blank-O title emerges every other week, so, yeah, Morgan, tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me on today. I’m excited to talk. Yeah, chief nursing officer, to me, sounds totally normal, because I grew up as a nurse at big hospitals that always had a chief nursing officer. But, of course, if you don’t work somewhere that has nurses, that’s going to sound a little funky to you, right? Yeah. And really how I got to where I am is kind of funky. It was not a straightforward path at all, not something I had planned out or set my sights on a decade ago. I started out as a bedside nurse at Duke University in the Raleigh-Durham area here in North Carolina. I started working in a – we called it the children’s resource unit. I went to all different pediatric areas of the hospital, spent a lot of time in the ICU, in the emergency department, and I loved it. I learned so much. It was a wonderful experience. And then COVID happened and things got a little dicey there. It was a big challenge, one that I’m proud to have played a part in, but what was most impactful for me and kind of what started me on this path where I ended up today now was I started seeing that the new nurses coming in to join us in this profession were very underprepared, and not to any fault of their own. They just didn’t have the experience that they needed to get prior to coming and working in a level one trauma center taking care of very, very ill patients. So that got my wheels turning. I started to think maybe there’s something I can do in kind of the education bubble, that’s something people talk about. I started kind of looking for ways to dip my toes in the water, so to speak, see what’s out there, and that was when I connected with the CEO, Karthik Koduru, of Archer Review. He was working on trying to put together a platform to really enable nursing education that was accessible and affordable and specifically targeted nurses getting ready to take their board exams. We call those exams the NCLEX and it’s that last test you have to take before you’re fully licensed, you’re out there on your own actually caring for patients. And we had really poor pass rates. They were anywhere from about 80 to 87 percent, depending on the year and which group of students you were looking at, but what Karthik said is that leaves 20 to 13 percent of students here that are educated to be nurses and that we now don’t have at the bedside actually addressing clients. And there’s this huge nursing shortage and we’ve got this pandemic, we need nurses, so this is a problem that needs solving. That’s where he and I intersected and started really trying to build this platform that could connect with nursing students. I’ll say the rest is history. I’m sure we’ll get into more of the nitty gritty as we talk, but that was the impetus for me seeing that there was the problem, starting to brainstorm how I could be a part of the solution, and it really started carving this different path from there. So what was the nature of the problem that happened with nursing and COVID? Was it the fact that we had people who were expected to do one kind of nursing and then, all of a sudden, a pandemic hit? Or is it more structural around a lot of people graduating from nursing programs and just not having the sufficient education for generally what that job entails, even during non-pandemic times? Yeah. I tend to say more the latter. We have a structural problem. And don’t get me wrong, I’m sure it’s multifactorial and we could probably pick apart ten different things that are contributing, but some of the top ones that I am trying to address are a lack of hands-on clinical experience in those formative nursing school years, that was really augmented by COVID when we weren’t allowing students to come into the clinical environment during the pandemic for very good reasons. They graduated nursing school and didn’t really have experience touching a patient, and that was a big, big driver of what I was seeing working in the emergency department. Beyond that, there are several structural components that have to be addressed if we are not going to face a crisis-level nursing shortage, and the biggest one is that we do not have enough nursing faculty to teach all of the upcoming nursing students and do it well. Nursing students need a lot of mentoring. They’re coming on, taking these complex courses, learning about things for the first time that are very challenging, and that requires faculty who are invested in them, ready to really be a partner in their success, and you can only do that for so many students. We’re all human. So when we’ve got these faculty that are responsible for 200 nursing students, we end up with high failure rates, high dropout rates, nurses that aren’t supported and get burned out really quickly. I’m not trying to say anything bad about the faculty. They’re being asked to do a big job with little resources. And I think where Archer Review comes in is bridging that gap so that faculty can more effectively mentor that next generation of nurses.Share on X So, we’re having problems pumping out nurses to meet the needs and I know there’s also a generational component of it too, with the aging population and just knowing that as our largest baby boomer generation group retires, gets older, needs more nursing care, we need more people graduating from these programs from generations that are smaller. Yeah, absolutely. There’s a mismatch here in the number of nurses that we have coming up and the number of patients that we are seeing. We’re already seeing that and it’s just going to continue to widen. So, unless we get very smart about the way we educate this next generation of nurses, we’re not going to fix the problem. We’re not going to magically have 10 percent more faculty that can adequately mentor a larger group of nurses. We’ve got to innovate how we can effectively teach them, give them the support and guidance that they need and deserve, and do it without burning out our faculty as well. So it really requires rethinking our teaching models, using technology to the full extent of what we can, using it appropriately, a dozen other things that I probably haven’t thought of yet. That makes sense. And so you talked initially about nurses unprepared for the challenge of both COVID as well as general challenges of the profession that originate from the fact that the faculty that was training them were just too stretched thin. They were stretched too thin. And that is one component of what has many components, but it’s an area that I am actively seeking to address in my work with Archer Review. We can all just only do so much. We can only serve as a mentor to so many students. A big thing I talk about is we should be actively looking at the students we’re teaching. Let’s say I’m responsible for a hundred students and identifying who is struggling early. So if we’ve got, after test one in nursing school pharmacology course, these three students failed, we need to actively work with, problem solve, and remediate then and not waiting until they failed the entire class and now they can’t progress with their curricula. And when we have a hundred, two hundred students, how challenging is it to actively monitor every single one of those individuals and get them the mentorship and guidance they need? It’s near impossible. We just only have so many hours in the day. So Archer Review comes in to play there providing an educator dashboard that helps automate that, polling and aggregating data and presenting it visually to the faculty so that they can quickly see 10 percent of my class is below where I need them to be, they are struggling with concepts A, B, and C, so now I can be smarter in my effects to how I remediate, what I remediate, I say, work smarter, not harder. If you don’t know what areas they’re struggling in, it’s very hard to adequately remediate, and it just takes the manual pressure off of that faculty so they can actually do their jobs and what they’re great at, which is mentoring these nurses. And is the challenge specific to taking the people who’ve already enrolled in nursing programs and