When Dr. Kerry Kennedy, DNP, APRN, FNP-BC, ACHPN, VA-BC™, started her journey as an LVN working on a cardiac step-down unit in 2001, she quickly figured out how integral vascular access was to almost every aspect of health care.
“Back in the day, if you didn’t know how to start your own IVs, your workday was going to be miserable,” Dr. Kennedy said. “That’s how I saw it.”
It is a sentiment she has carried with her through degrees and career changes: vascular access is an integral skill for all health care professionals, regardless of practice setting.
Preventing gaps in patient care
As a Nurse Practitioner with the pediatric and adult home hospice and palliative population, she rarely inserts or directly maintains lines anymore. She now manages the clinical needs of patients with chronic or terminal illnesses to palliate symptoms, and to make treatment and end-of-life care decisions in line with their personal beliefs and values.
VA-BC™ since 2012, she also has made an intentional point to prevent gaps in her patients’ care by including evidence-based practices in vascular access wherever possible, regardless of the clinical setting.
“Vascular access devices are a central intervention, a central process, needed for many patients in health care in order to receive medications, lab work or diagnostic testing,” she said. “It’s just a necessity to understand how these devices work.”
Her vascular access journey blossomed while working on the IV Team at MD Anderson Cancer Center. Since they saw thousands of patients each year for all sorts of devices, Dr. Kennedy said her supervisor at the time pushed for the whole team to gain their VA-BC™ to deliver the best care and achieve the best outcomes possible.
“Working there gave me this great foundation to always ensure my goal is to aim for clinical excellence,” she said.
During her time at MD Anderson, she gained her bachelor’s and master’s degrees (her doctorate to soon follow), advanced her skills, and became comfortable with public speaking by educating patients and their families about caring for their lines.
Mentoring others in vascular access
When she changed direction in her career, she debated keeping her VA-BC™. Then she saw the hesitancy from other health care professionals when it came to managing vascular access devices: how they work, how to manage them, and how to utilize them to improve patient outcomes. Dr. Kennedy became determined to reduce the intimidation that other clinicians felt by mentoring on the job.
Due to her experience and certification, Kennedy has educated not only other staff through several positions in her career, but she also has traveled to institution-wide leadership meetings to do the same. She has also used her advanced practice nursing role to help implement policies and procedures to integrate best practices in vascular access and prevent gaps in care, like checking for adhesive allergies.
“Things that in the vascular access world we take for granted, because it’s just the standard,” she said.
“So many of the wonderful things that helped me to feel really good about who I have become, and all I have accomplished, occurred because of this initial certification and because of my role in placing and managing these lines. It’s the absolute truth.”
Even in her current role, she can easily forget how vascular access knowledge is not widespread. She was explaining the structure and function of a patient’s double lumen PICC to her coworkers and turned to find that they were looking at her wide-eyed in amazement.
“It changed the way that the nurses have approached me since then. They do feel more confident,” she said. “The goal is trying to make sure that we address every aspect of [a patient’s] care.”
Look at the patient as a whole, then determine care
One reason why vascular access may be intimidating to some is because it is largely seen as specialized knowledge that has not been accessible to many clinicians in the field, Dr. Kennedy said, which can limit the opportunities for other clinicians to become familiar with it.
“One of the problems of health care is that everyone is functioning in silos. We forget that we’re talking about the same human being— it’s just that different departments and services manage different parts of their care,” she said. “Palliative medicine has taught me to look at the whole human being.”
She traces back her ability to be a leader and a resource to colleagues, regardless of the setting, to her beginnings in vascular access and the passion for the specialty that only grew in the years to come.
“So many of the wonderful things that helped me to feel really good about who I have become, and all I have accomplished, occurred because of this initial certification and because of my role in placing and managing these lines. It’s the absolute truth.”
