After a decade of hands-on nursing, alumna Carly Baker saw firsthand how healthcare policies affect patient wellbeing. Striving to be both a provider and advocate for her patients, she returned to school to pursue a higher education that would allow her to help people both on and behind the scenes.
“I’m still learning how to be a provider and I want to continue working towards that, but I’m also studying healthcare policy, which is important for advocacy and influencing policy,” Carly said. “I’d like to be able to do both – it’s important to be in the practice setting to see what is affecting patients so that you can then say ‘hey, this is what I’m seeing, and this is what’s happening in practice, and what can we do to make this better?'”
Carly was living in Denver at the time and knew she wanted to stay in Colorado for graduate school, so she enrolled at UCCS to earn her master’s degree in nursing. After graduating in 2022 from Helen and Arthur E. Johnson Beth-El College of Nursing and Health Sciences, she continued pursuing higher education and is currently earning her doctorate.
“I really owe a lot my success and my focus to UCCS,” said Carly. “The curriculum’s different aspects and exposure to different things did a good job about educating students on the history of being a family nurse practitioner and how important it is to work in preventative medicine. Through that I started to ask ’what is prevention really? And how do we get there?’ To me, it was that we get there through advocacy, and that led me into doing the doctorate program specifically for healthcare policy.”
Before her interest in studying healthcare policy, Carly was already broadening her horizons as a nurse through internships and international healthcare initiatives. She spent time working at Hospital Bernard Mevs in Haiti, the country’s sole trauma center, and traveled to Paraguay to assist in Operation Smile, a nonprofit specializing in free surgery for children with cleft palates and other dental conditions.
“My love and passion for nursing grew with the experience that I had,” shared Carly. “I started in the emergency room at a Houston trauma center, one of the busiest trauma centers in the United States, and I began looking at nursing as an opportunity to expand my horizons, meet other people and get some exposure to other cultures. And when I was doing the internship for the state department, I got to work with the medical department on some recruiting initiatives. It wasn’t so much around healthcare specifically, but on how they recruit people and use social media. So it was kind of a step away from the clinical setting, which was such a cool and interesting experience.”
“While doing that internship, I learned that the state department has a medical department hiring physicians and nurse practitioners to practice in their embassies all over the world and that they work with USAid and similar health agencies within each country on different initiatives,” Carly added. “That’s an opportunity I’d love to consider in the future, and I really recommend anyone who’s getting their undergraduate or graduate degree to consider working with them. There’s so many different scholarship opportunities and so many different things that you can do in the state department.”
Despite a busy schedule between her current job at a federally-qualified health center, doctoral studies and other pursuits, Carly is also a member of the Texas Nurses Association and volunteers her time on the TNA policy committee, as well as participating in events like the American Nurses Associations Hill Day.
“One of the best parts of my job is taking care of patients,” said Carly. “I’ve done that for 13 years, as a brand-new nurse all the way to now as a family nurse practitioner, but I also really love the advocacy. As a bedside nurse, and even nurse practitioner, you can directly affect the patient that you’re taking care of and you can have an influence in their life at the bedside. But in the grand scheme of things and getting people the care that they need, whether it’s advocating for affordable healthcare or prescriptions or many other issues, all of that has to come through advocacy and I think that it’s so important that nurses step into that role of being an advocate as well.”
Carly strongly encourages her fellow healthcare personnel to advocate and get involved as much as possible, but to also keep work-life balance and their own health in mind.
“It takes a lot of work, and sometimes it’s slow moving with policy, but get out there and advocate and vote. But we also need to remember as health healthcare providers, we’re still human beings, so taking a minute to readjust the work-life balance is important.”