Lisa Campana, BSN, RN, CEN, MICN, believes in embracing each day, sharing her talents and pursuing adventure. The emergency department at Hoag Hospital in Newport Beach, California, where she is a charge nurse and the hospital system’s 2023 Nurse of the Year, is just one location where she carries out what she calls her “severe passion for life.”
In June, Campana completed her fourth medical mission, a five-day trip to the Philippines. Emergency nurses are, of course, no stranger to intensity, but Campana said the missions are “a different kind of intense.” She joined a group of volunteers who worked at Stanford Health Care, and over the course of three days in 2022, they cared for 1,800 people. The group returned to care for another 2,300 people in 2023. Prior to that, she volunteered with Women for World Health in 2018 and 2019 to care for patients receiving cataract surgeries in Peru and Ecuador.
“We helped many elderly people who had never seen their grandchildren,” Campana said. “After surgery, they would open their eyes, see their family and break down crying in gratitude. Just that alone is magnificently purposeful.”
Campana in turn, felt gratitude for the people she had traveled to help.
“These recipients gave us the social and emotional support we need in our lives,” she said. “It’s an essential reminder that the overall needs of most are unconditional, compassionate care and love.”
Her colleagues at Hoag certainly see and feel her compassionate care. When they nominated her for Nurse of the Year, they praised her clinical excellence, patient-centered approach and nurturing demeanor as she goes above and beyond in her role. Campana is quick to give credit to Hoag, saying the hospital’s leadership truly collaborates with and supports its nurses, as well as stays at the forefront of many best practices when it comes to emergency nursing.
“The Hoag family has truly helped me grow into who I am today,” Campana said of the place she’s spent her entire nursing career. Over the past decade of her career, she has also been an active ENA member and will be a delegate for the third time at this year’s General Assembly in September.
Campana said she was raised in a commune in upstate New York where she lived a rather carefree lifestyle. At 22, ready to find a clearer path forward, she moved to California, where she met her life partner, Bryan, and worked in marketing for about 14 years. She may have moved forward, but she still hadn’t found where she truly wanted to be professionally by the time her mother suffered a stroke and spent several days in the ICU prior to passing away. That experience revealed her new path.
“I should have been a nurse,” she recalled saying. “This is where I belong.” With encouragement from the nurses who had cared for her mom and her own friends in nursing, Campana overcame her uncertainty, changed her focus and enrolled at Golden West College Huntington Beach to begin her second career.
Campana loves hiking and traveling—she has explored parts of South America, Southeast Asia and Australia—but there’s one place she doesn’t want to leave.
“I love my job so much, and I can’t wait to go to work. I can’t imagine going anywhere else,” Campana said.