Pat Clutter says she was never one to camp, canoe or even book a luxury cruise for her vacations. That didn’t stop her from sleeping in tents, paddling Amazon tributaries or even boarding an ocean cruise ship in order to deliver patient care or teach life-saving skills.
“You have to get to the people. If that’s what you have to do, that’s what I do,” she said.
Clutter was first inspired to deliver her nursing expertise beyond her emergency department in 2001, when she served as Missouri State ENA Council president. That year, she met Jeff Solheim, a new Missouri member, who would become the 2018 ENA president.
Solheim mentioned he ran an organization that was preparing for a medical mission to Bolivia. She joined the group for the trip—and more than a dozen others in the following years—and became its education director. She developed village health care provider programs to teach first aid and other skills in communities lacking trained clinicians, and she led seminars for doctors, nurses and paramedics in other areas.
“The field trips were just the best. I had so many experiences with those,” Clutter said. The “experiences” included harrowing moments, such as watching a boat in her group catch fire, saving a Bolivian doctor from anaphylactic shock due to ants in her sleeping bag, and falling off a cliff.
“One leg hit dirt. One leg hit air, and over I went. God put a ledge there, and I fell on the ledge, or I wouldn’t have survived,” she said.
At home in Missouri, Clutter spent most of her early career at an urban Level I trauma center before taking on an agency position.
“I worked every small ER in the area,” she said. “It was a big education for me. Instead of the one accepting those patients, I was the one sending the patients.”
The agency job gave Clutter the flexibility to take time for missions, teaching and writing, as well as two decades as a part-time cruise nurse working on ships that sailed around Alaska, Hawaii, Mexico, the Caribbean and Europe.
“I had never been on a cruise ship in my life,” Clutter said, and she found the enormity of the ship intimidating at first. She quickly learned she would be doing things that weren’t common for an ED-based nurse, such as x-rays and labs or accompanying patients to a hospital in port—even if the ship itself hadn’t yet arrived in port and a helicopter was needed to fly them to the nearest ED.
Clutter’s path toward nursing began on a walk to church when she was 9 years old.
“I remember thinking clearly, ‘I want to be a nurse,’” she said.
After graduating nursing school in Springfield, Missouri, in 1972, Clutter worked on a cardiac care unit and soon began pushing for a position in the ED. She achieved that goal in 1974, and two years later she joined ENA. She has served numerous roles within the association and in her state chapter. Clutter was part of the first class inducted into the Academy of Emergency Nursing in 2005.
In recent years, family obligations took more time, so she worked her last 13-hour shift in triage in January 2022. Clutter still lectures around the country and teaches CEN review classes and a triage course in addition to her ongoing volunteer work with ENA and as international section co-editor of the Journal of Emergency Nursing.
“I’ve had some wonderful experiences and some scary experiences, but oh my gosh I wouldn’t have traded it for anything in the world,” she said.