'It's what I was put on this planet to do'
Miami Valley Hospital

Profile: Amanda Veldman, Team Leader, Neurology Unit
By KEN MOSIER
For Health Care Today

After high school, Amanda Veldman enrolled in college with the aim of becoming a doctor. Then she decided that she would rather take a more personal interest in her patient's lives.

"I wanted to get to know the patients and their families and really try to make an impact — you know, a difference in their lives," she said. "I had ill family members when I was younger and I thought, 'Who do I really remember and who helped us the most?' It was the nurses I really remembered and I want to do that for other people. So I decided I would go into nursing."

While working on her Bachelor of Science in Nursing degree at Wright State University, Veldman worked as a patient care technician on the Neurology Unit at Miami Valley Hospital.

Now, seven years after graduation, she is still on the unit but as a team leader. "I really loved the unit and the people I worked with so I just decided to stay here as a staff nurse," she said.

"We take care of spinal cord injuries, head injuries, people with MS (multiple sclerosis), people with neurological deficits," she explained. "We are also an advanced-care unit so we have a lot of patients who need closer monitoring or more frequent checks and interactions with a nurse than they would in a med-surg unit. We also take patients that are coming out of the intensive care unit."

	Amanda Veldman and Lisa Keller examine EKG readout tapes.

Veldman said patients are more complex today with multiple illnesses.

"It challenges my critical thinking skills to work here on this unit," she said. "We have patients that do have neurological problems — such as they have had a stroke — but they also have cardiac problems or diabetes.

"With the baby boomers getting older and the advances in health care, people are staying healthy longer. But when they get sick, they have lots of things wrong with them. So our patients are pretty complex, and it is very challenging," she continued.

She said she had no regrets in choosing nursing over becoming an M.D. "I really love being a nurse. It is what I believe I was put on this planet to do," she said adding that her promotion to team leader has given her the opportunity to impact her peers as well as her patients. "I want other people to be as passionate about it as I am."