Women in health care: Meet Diane Bartos – Albany Times Union

Photo: Colleen Ingerto / Times Union

Diane Bartos, Administrative Director of Critical Care and Cardiology Services at Saratoga Hospital, in the ICCU at Saratoga Hospital, on Friday, December 2, 2016. (Colleen Ingerto / Times Union)

January/February 2017 edition of Women@Work magazine.

Women in health care: Meet Diane Bartos

Diane Bartos, administrative director of Critical Care and Cardiology Services at Saratoga Hospital, knew she wanted to get her doctorate, even as an undergraduate in nursing. She spent 20 years as a nurse at St. Peter's Hospital before going to Saratoga Hospital 13 years ago, working on her master's degree for 10 years before moving on to pursue her doctorate of nursing practice. She focused that work on rebuilding Saratoga Hospital's intensive care unit, just part of a more than $35 million overhaul, which involved intense feedback from every member of the hospital staff.

Q: What led you to nursing?

A: There's nobody in my family that's a nurse at all. I started working in a nursing home as a nurse's aide, and I loved it. And when I decided I wanted to do nursing, I didn't get a lot of support because nobody was a nurse. They were all engineers and accountants, and they were like, "Why do you want to do that?" I persevered through. I went to Boston University as an undergraduate.

I've always wanted higher ed ... and so I pursued that and was able to do some research in the master's program and found that very helpful. It took me almost 10 years to do that because the research just took forever. I did it by myself, and I decided for my doctorate, I didn't want to do that because I'm getting way too old. So I did a different type of program. The doctorate in nursing practice is actually what I have, so it's a practice program. It takes the research that is out there and implements it into practice. It's an interesting degree because it's really a hands-on type of degree. When I was going for my doctorate, we were also in the midst of building the ICU, so what we did was looked at all the research ... in health care environments and used the research to design the new ICU.

Women@Work

This story the first in a series in the Sunday business section about women in health care also appears in the January/February issue of Women@Work magazine. For more inspiring stories about Capital Region working women and articles that offer career advice, sign up today for $25 at tuwomenatwork.com. You'll get a year's subscription to the magazine and become part of a network of 1,700 Capital Region women who want to grow their careers and help other women grow, too.

Q: You also did some research of your own for that, right?

A: What we really wanted to try to do was be really inclusive. What we did was ask everyone and when I say everyone I mean everyone. We put the architectural plans up in the unit and asked people to put up their thoughts and ideas. When I say everyone it was doctors, it was housekeepers, it was pastoral care, we got all sorts of input from all these different people.

Then we actually built a room, it was all a mess up here, but we also brought everybody up and did the same thing for the room. We used yellow stickies (to represent the furniture/room components) and we kept moving things around. Everybody's input was valuable. The housekeeper said, "How are you going to clean that?" We have these booms that hang from the ceiling, and she was interested in the cleaning aspect. The booms(are) just columns and on those columns they have oxygen, suction, electrical, they had the monitors, so we had to really pay attention to where we wanted everything.

Q: How important is education in nurses advancing into leadership?

A: Education definitely helps when you're talking to physicians and MBAs; you have to be able to speak their language. Sometimes some of the other areas take a higher precedence, such as finances. And nurses need to be educated on that also, so they can talk at the table about finances and quality metrics, reimbursement, all of that.

Q: But there's so much to keep up on just in the medicine part. How do you do both?

A: You have to kind of decide which way you want to go and support each other along the way. There is a huge power base within nursing that has that hands-on, and they know what will work because of simply being there. So somebody might be into the research and keep abreast of all the research. It's really imperative to work with the leaders in that organization to bring that research forward and to implement it. Others might be strong in the finances and need to work with building budgets with their peers.

I think that most females generally have children, and I think it's very difficult. How do you manage and juggle all of it? I try and do everything that I can to help the nurses here that are in school that have families, as far as giving them time off and things like that, but they have to do the work. The good side of that is that nursing is so flexible. You can go back to school and work three days a week. You can still work full-time and still go to school one day a week and get it done. You can work part-time. You can work off shifts. You can work weekends.

Q: Did you have strong mentors?

A: Even as a CNA in the nursing home, I can think of one nurse back then that encouraged me. And she was like the pristine nurse. She was meticulous, down to her shoestrings. She knew what she was doing all the time.

There were certain bosses that I had that were certainly mentors to me. There were certainly clinical people that were mentors to me. There were people who had these great ways of thinking about health care, and which ways we needed to go.