Andrea Bertheaud

Healthcare Educator

Clinical Assistant Professor, Elms College

She’s Raising Up a Young Generation of Nurses with Empathy, Conviction

Andrea Bertheaud

Andrea Bertheaud’s early career in nursing found her in challenging settings — a year on an oncology unit followed by 15 more in critical care, which she thoroughly enjoyed.

After retreating from the field for a dozen years to raise her kids, she went back to work in a nursing home in 1999, then decided to go back to school for her bachelor’s and master’s degrees. And that’s when she found her true calling.

“One of my classmates was a psych nurse, and I did a project with her at Roca,” Bertheaud recalled, referring to the successful violence-prevention program. “She was so inspirational. I saw her work with this clientele; there were maybe 15 young men between the ages of 18 and 26, and I saw how she brought them in and controlled the room. And I said, ‘that’s the skill I want.’”

So she became certified in mental health and eventually worked in that field at Providence Behavioral Health Hospital and Baystate Health. And those experiences sparked in her a desire to teach others.

“It was mainly psychiatric patients, a lot of co-morbidities with substance use. And patients were frequently recurring, so I got to know them over and over through a lot of admissions. And I felt like we weren’t supporting them enough in the community,” Bertheaud said. “I also found there was a lot of stigma toward mental health, which I have to admit I had. And I found it was a different skill set. In the ICU, in an open heart or trauma, that’s a skill. But being a mental health nurse is a different skill set. And it kind of called to me.”

Today, Bertheaud teaches mental health and population health to aspiring nurses in the Elms College School of Nursing, preparing them — and, many times, inspiring them — to work in challenging settings.

“A lot of it is communication skills,” she explained. “If you want to be safe, it’s not about controlling the situation; it’s communicating and getting the situation opened up so that everybody is safe. Even a psychotic person, they’re not intent on hurting themselves or others. They’re intent on controlling the situation through their perception. I have to understand that before I can approach them safely. And a lot of nurses don’t quite understand that.

“I hear all the time about nurses getting hurt because we want to save the situation,” she went on. “We want to run in like the firemen or policemen, and we have no protection, and we are not taught how to assess the situation. Now I never run in a room, no matter what’s happening. I’m looking around. I’m seeing where everybody’s at. I’m reading the room. And those are skills I learned as a psych nurse.”

Population health, on the other hand, is more of a global view of nursing. “Instead of just looking at your community, it’s stepping back a little bit and looking at the difference between the European healthcare system versus the United States healthcare system versus healthcare in Africa or Asia, and what works for them and what doesn’t, and what are their health outcomes,” she explained. “One example is maternity health — we have really low numbers in maternity health compared to a lot of developed countries in the world. Why is that? Those are the questions we look at in population health.”

“One of my classmates was a psych nurse, and I did a project with her at Roca. She was so inspirational. I saw her work with this clientele; there were maybe 15 young men between the ages of 18 and 26, and I saw how she brought them in and controlled the room. And I said, ‘that’s the skill I want.’”

In the decade Bertheaud has been at Elms College, not only teaching students but helping them gain valuable experience in community health settings locally, she has become “the face of Elms College nursing to many community members,” said Julie Beck, dean of the School of Nursing, who nominated Bertheaud as a Healthcare Hero.

“In her courses, Andrea synthesizes the physical and mental needs of the clients that she cares for. She utilizes humor, patience, skill, education, and wisdom when teaching her classes and leads by example when working with clients out in the field. Andrea serves as a Healthcare Hero not only to community members, but also as a nurse educator here at Elms College.”

Behind the Locked Doors

She does so with raw honesty and a belief in hands-on experience, especially when it comes to the challenging settings young nurses may face in the mental-health world.

“Last year was the first year I was able to get every single student into inpatient, which was really important, and which was a request of the students because they may never see the inside of a psychiatric unit, an acute locked ward, unless they have experience through school. It’s a completely different kind of unit. I’ve had nurses that have been teaching or practicing for 50 years, and they’ll say, ‘what happens behind those closed doors?’

Andrea Bertheaud (right) participates in a service trip to Jamaica with Mustard Seed Communities.

“I’ve actually invited people in the hospital I worked at, in administration, for three or four hours on my shift doing direct care and have them follow me so they’ll understand what a psychiatric nurse does and how we approach people, how we set boundaries,” she went on. “And they have really interesting questions because, again, they don’t know the skill. I didn’t learn it in ICU.

“So this is a very different skill set,” she went on. “I try to get as many students exposed to that and help them destigmatize that population. They come in terrified the first shift. One group was panicked, and I had to hold them off from going onto the unit because they were so nervous. I had to sit there and talked about their feelings until I had them settled enough so I could go onto the floor — because you don’t want to bring that kind of energy onto a psychiatric ward. They have enough energy and dysfunction as it is.”

But while teaching safety and boundaries to students, Bertheaud also emphasizes empathy and humanity.

“I want them to realize, ‘that could be me. I’m one car accident away from having a traumatic brain injury. Then my whole world would change, and this is how I would act.’ Elms students tend to be very, very smart, but because of their background, some of them — not all, but some of them — don’t have exposure to people who have had challenges.

“So I try to work on teamwork,” she added. “I’ve worked with some of the best teams in nursing, where I called it a symphony — all of a sudden everybody’s getting into their spot, and everybody knows what they’re doing to do. It’s just like music, and we can handle anything that comes through that door. But it takes skill. It takes working together with people who are very, very different.”

“In her courses, Andrea synthesizes the physical and mental needs of the clients that she cares for. She utilizes humor, patience, skill, education, and wisdom when teaching her classes and leads by example when working with clients out in the field.”

Bertheaud was also recently certified in bioethics and medical humanities, having taken classes with Dr. Peter DePergola, one of the region’s foremost medical ethicists and an associate professor at Elms.

“It’s about understanding the history, how we got here, and understanding how we can be more ethical,” she said. “Nurses are generally ethical — some of them not so much, but I think we’re at an advantage because we work with patients one on one, so we want better outcomes. I think when you get up to administration, that’s where we drop the ball — when you go up and you’re away from those patients; you’re not doing direct care. That’s when we get into making decisions that aren’t always outcome-based.

“In the last 40 years, I’ve seen healthcare become very monetized and profit-minded,” she added. “So I want to kind of instill that back in and have these young nurses challenged in this way. I want them to be able to see the bigger picture and look for the best outcomes and really be ethical nurses, challenge the system.”

And, again, challenging the system means understanding it, through real-world experience, from very early on.

Andrea Bertheaud with some of the medical simulation ‘babies’ used to demonstrate everything from fetal alcohol syndrome to shaken baby syndrome.
Staff Photo

“I think, in leadership, we’re focused on degrees, which is helpful. I’m all for education, but I think we need to incorporate experience a little bit into it. I’ve seen nurses that come into nursing school going, ‘I want to be an NP,’ ‘I want to be a DNP,’ ‘I want to be a provider.’ And I’m like, you’ve got to walk before you run. You’ve got to know all these things before you can get to the next level.”

Outside the College Walls

Bertheaud’s impact extends well beyond the walls of Elms College; she has participated in service trips outside the U.S. and regularly teaches parents in the local community about any number of issues, often employing medical simulation ‘babies’ from the college’s expansive collection of lifelike sims.

“In the community, we can go in and teach a group of parents how easy it is to get shaken baby syndrome. And then we have a fetal alcohol syndrome baby [sim], and we can talk about those characteristics compared to a normal baby and what that looks like. And we can talk about brain development.”

She involves students in community health as well. “Last year, I had 86 students in 20 different placements. We were in high schools and Head Start and Square One, and I’ve been to Roca, you name it. If they let me in and it’s challenging, I’m like, ‘oh, I’ll put a student there.’ I have students at the jail. I bring in six students, and we do that two days a week.

“I’m in the community, and we’re doing teaching at senior citizen centers, we’ll do high blood pressure screenings, we’ll do healthy eating and sleeping for older people, which is a problem, fall prevention, you name it.”

As for her mental health focus, not many students were choosing that field as their entry into nursing, “but now I’m seeing a lot more. Especially after COVID, people have realized that mental health and population health are two things that are really important. I think students can be so focused on learning how to put in an IV and take blood pressure that they forget that there are bigger things.”

For Bertheaud, teaching has been that bigger thing, in many ways.

“When you’re a bedside nurse, you’re affecting your patient. Or maybe you’re precepting one nurse every couple months. But when I’m teaching, I can affect 60 or 90 students in a semester. And then I get to see them the next year and see how they’ve grown.

“I like to see them after they graduate,” she added. “I’m like, ‘oh my God, you’re going be somebody.’ The energy of a 20- or 30-year-old is just so cool. They’re unstoppable.”

For never stopping until she found her place of greatest impact, Andrea Bertheaud certainly earns the title of Healthcare Hero.