Treating patients with dignity has been at the center of Christie Jandora’s emergency nursing career. Jandora, MSN, RN, is the emergency services director at Ascension Sacred Heart Hospital, which participates in a program that connects community hospitals and service organizations in the Pensacola, Florida, area to improve care for people who are experiencing homelessness.
The most recent effort she has been involved with is coordinating with community organizations that can provide respite beds for ED patients to recover safely after discharge.
“We don’t want to send them back to their homeless camp because they have an open wound or a splint or something where we know they just won’t do well,” Jandora said.
Jandora’s efforts through her hospital and the community network began several years ago.
“We have a team through our community health partners where we’re looking at how can we better serve these ‘familiar faces,’ as we call them. They’re the ones who come in just because they’re homeless. They want a turkey sandwich. They just want to get out of the heat,” Jandora said. “This started with ‘Let’s get the frequent fliers out of the ED,’ and moved to ‘Let’s identify some of the reasons why they are coming.’ That spun off into other projects.”
Jandora planned on becoming a doctor and was in college majoring in pre-med when her mother suffered an aneurysm. Her mother did not survive. Jandora's plans for medical school were curtailed, but that experience opened her eyes to something else.
“I found myself in the ICU for a couple of weeks with my mom, really learning what I would never want to be as a nurse but also learning what I would want to be as a nurse,” Jandora said. “I had some really great nurses, where I felt wow, this is my calling.”
As she completed nursing school and gravitated to the ED, her mother’s experience in the hospital continued to influence Jandora.
Her mother was a migraine patient, and the prescription medications she took caused her to show up as opioid-positive. It was before the “worst headache of my life” statement would raise a red flag for an aneurysm. Instead, she was referred to drug treatment and was about to be discharged when she coded, Jandora recalled.
“I found a passion then for ER nursing, to treat people with respect and dignity and make sure people are heard and assessed properly with no bias,” she said. “I find a lot of peace in seeing the evolution of health care since then.”
Jandora joined ENA early in her career, and she said she loved the resources and the Journal of Emergency Nursing. She found mentors, made many friends and became increasingly involved in her state before being thrust into the role of delegate. She was already in St. Louis for Emergency Nursing 2017 when a hurricane prevented many Florida members from getting out of the state.
She quickly took the delegate preparation training and participated in General Assembly. Jandora is government affairs co-chair and president-elect for the Florida ENA State Council, and she serves on the ENA Foundation scholarship committee, which she said she particularly loves.
“It’s so rewarding to read the applications. It’s inspiring. It reminds you of why you became a nurse to begin with,” she said. “And then you get to call recipients and give them what can be life-changing money for a lot of these people. It’s inspiring and it’s fun and it’s giving back.”
She remembers receiving one of those calls herself, when she was awarded and ENA Foundation scholarship to help with her own education at Western Governors University.
“The more you get involved in ENA, the more you want to get involved,” Jandora said.