Kara Lombardi
As Assistant Nurse Manager, Her Role Is to Be a Support Person
Kara Lombardi traces her interest in healthcare, and the nursing profession, to her father’s bladder cancer diagnosis and subsequent visits to the hospital.
“It was a pretty late stage, so he was going back and forth to Boston with my mom,” she recalled, noting that she was just 15 at the time. “Obviously, it was a hard time for everyone, especially him, and when I would go visit, I would notice that, whenever the nurses came in, he was able to smile and joke with them; they brightened up his day.
“He always talked about how great and wonderful the nurses were, how they lifted his spirits when he was in the hospital,” she went on. “So they made me realize that’s what I wanted to do for people — I wanted to help them through the toughest days that they were going through.”
Today, several years after graduating from the Elms College nursing program, working in a few different settings, earning a master’s degree in nursing education through an online program, and rising in the ranks to assistant nurse manager of the med-surg unit at Mercy Medical Center, Lombardi gets to do some of that.
“I like teaching — that’s why I got my degree in that as well — and I like having the opportunity to teach nurses to be the best they can be, give them confidence, and show them what they can achieve in their career.”
But mostly, she’s managing and training others as they enter the profession, gain experience, and help patients through their toughest days.
It’s a job, one she’s been in for six years now, that comes with many rewards and opportunities for her to continue learning and growing as a manager and educator; in fact, she teaches the med-surg clinical for Westfield State University.
Lombardi talked about her role at length with BusinessWest, touching on the many aspects of this work that she enjoys.
“We round on the patients and make sure they’re having good experiences,” she said while giving a quick job description. “And we’re always available to help the nurses on the floor with whatever they need. And with the new grads, we’ll help answer questions they might have. We’re their support person, and we’re always available for them.
“I like that I can not only help the nurses, but have interaction with the patients, make sure they’re having a good experience, and do anything I can to make their stay better,” she went on. “I like teaching — that’s why I got my degree in that as well — and I like having the opportunity to teach nurses to be the best they can be, give them confidence, and show them what they can achieve in their career.”
What those coming out of nursing school need most is support, she added, and she’s committed to providing it, in whatever form it takes.
“They need to know that they’re not alone, that they can always ask for help — I think that’s very important,” she explained. “They need to know their resources and understand that they’re not going to know everything when they come out of school. A lot of nursing is gaining experience on the job, so as long as they know when to ask for help and whom to ask for help, they’ll be all set.”
Lombardi quickly acknowledged that this ability to ask for help is certainly an acquired skill, something she helps young grads with as much as anything she might teach at the bedside.
“Some don’t want to ask for help, and we discourage that,” she told BusinessWest. “We always encourage people to ask for help, and that’s one of the things I always do; I always make sure, especially with the new grads, to round on them multiple times a shift, asking them if they need help, what I can do for them, and picking their brains a little bit.”
Lombardi said the role of the nurse manager takes on even more importance at a time when many veteran nurses are retiring, others are moving on to less stressful work — a byproduct, in many respects, of the COVID years — and fewer people are getting into the profession.
“A lot of people don’t want to work at the bedside anymore — they want those remote jobs, office jobs, or even the aesthetics industry, with Botox and all that … many new nurses want to get into that field,” she said. “So it’s harder to find good bedside nurses.”
As for her own career, she said would like to eventually move into education, rather than a management role at a facility like Mercy.
“That’s one of my favorite jobs — I like giving students good habits and teach them the way things should be,” she explained. “And I don’t hide what real life is like because I feel that nursing school, sometimes, doesn’t really give the full picture of what it’s really like at the bedside. So I make sure that they see real-life situations.
“Everything isn’t going to be sunshine and rainbows,” Lombardi went on. “Things are going to go wrong, and you’re going to make mistakes, and it’s important that, if you do make a mistake, you own up to it so that something really bad doesn’t happen. And you need to learn from your mistakes; you have to get through it and learn from your experiences.”
That’s just one lesson she tries to impart on young people as they move forward in the same profession she chose. She’s not at the bedside as much as she once was, but she’s still deeply committed to providing care and helping patients through the worst of times, just like those nurses did with her father.
