Transcript
Heather Stallings
Hi, I’m Heather Stallings. I’m a nurse practitioner for ICP. I have been a nurse practitioner for seven years and I’ve been with ICP for one year. I have a husband and two children. One is twelve and one is about to be four. And the three year old, almost four year old just keeps me busy. What we love to do is my kids play sports mainly my oldest, my youngest. You can’t get into too much of the organized stuff yet, but we’re a sports family, we’re always outside, we like to do things. I love to read, spend time with my family and friends.
I chose to be a nurse practitioner for an atypical reason. I actually wanted to be a dentist for years. That’s all I wanted to do. And so something that a lot of people don’t know about me is my oldest that I mentioned, he is a twin. And I lost his brother at birth. So I was a senior in college when I got married, and then we got pregnant and having twins. It was just one of those things where I was like I can’t keep living in Jonesboro, I can’t drive to Memphis and go to dental school, become a dentist with twins, raising them at the same time. So I started thinking, what does God have planned for me? Because obviously this is not the plan. And so I did some research and some talking and that’s how I came on this track. I knew I wanted to be in the medical field, I knew I wanted, wanted to be hands on with people, but I wanted to go further than just nursing like the basic level. And so I wound up being a nurse practitioner. And I love it. And God definitely knew what he was doing because I couldn’t visit as much with people as I do. So I chose long term care. When I got into this company, actually.
So I always wanted to do pediatrics, I thought, or adults. Never had the thought of geriatrics at all. And with the other positions that I’ve been in, with any interaction with the elderly, I wound up enjoying them. And this position just happened to come open, and I saw it and thought, you know, I want to try that. I’m enjoying doing did some home health assessments and getting to be around the geriatric population. And so when I got the job and started, I fell in love with long term care, and now this is, like, the only place that I want to be. So what I like about ICP is everything. I honestly cannot say anything bad about this company. So with other places that I’ve been, I’ve been a nurse practitioner for seven years, so I’ve had different jobs before this. The bosses that I’ve had have been so different than what I have now. And the boss that I have now is exactly what I’ve wanted. When you work as a nurse practitioner, you consider yourself a professional, not someone who needs to be micromanaged, someone on top of you all the time. And I finally have gotten that at this job. So with the other companies that I’ve been with as well, I was the only nurse practitioner that worked for that business. With one of them, I was the first nurse practitioner they had ever had. So it was really difficult to get at things that I needed to ask for things. And so being in a company where that’s basically, like, everyone in the company as a nurse practitioner is fantastic, they understand. My boss is a nurse practitioner. So she understands, and so there’s no problem with asking and the things that we need to understand. And then I have someone to talk to. Since I’ve been here with talking with the administrators and the do NS, I do know that the readmission rates have gone down. And I do know that all of my homes that I’m in, that the antipsychotic X, we are reducing those, and those are going down as well. The DON at one of my facilities is very passionate about that, and she’s had trouble with making that happen. And since I’ve been here, we work alongside of each other along with the pharmacist that comes in and does the reviews. We’ve gotten a lot of these medications down.
So I really love my job. I love ICP. This is the best job that I’ve ever had. I had a dream that everybody does right, that I’m going to have this certain type of job where, being in the medical field, I thought I would have work on my own time, spend time with my family, make good enough money that he can live comfortably. And then I’ve been thinking before this company, before I started this job, like, well, maybe it’s not possible as a nurse practitioner to have all of these things that I’ve wanted. And so with this company, I will tell anybody that I see and speak to if they’re willing to go into nurse practitioner or to be a nurse practitioner or if they’re looking for a job or even if they already have one that they need to check out. ICP because I love my job and I do not want to leave one.
