Davisa (center) has a passion for nursing education and mentorship
Davisa B. of Pensacola, Florida, learned the power of positive nursing when she was pregnant with her first child. She had lost her mother the previous year and the nurses stepped up to provide emotional and medical support.
“The nursing team provided the most awesome experience ever,” Davisa said. “I felt safe and like they genuinely cared about me, and cared about me being able to care for my daughter.”
Before this experience, she wanted to be a lawyer, but all it took was a talented nursing unit for her to alter her future plans. She earned her nursing degree, working as both a unit secretary and a nurse at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington D.C. While labor and delivery nursing was close to her heart, she began her career in the intermediate care unit where she began to feel the impact of positive nursing from the patients’ perspective.
“Patients don’t always remember what you say, but they remember how you make them feel,” she said. “So it became my goal to make them feel like how my original labor and delivery nurses made me feel.”
Davisa, who relocated to Pensacola in 2016, said her passion for nursing education and mentorship flourished after earning her master’s degree in nursing education. She now works as a staff nurse in the float pool at Ascension Sacred Heart Pensacola and as a lecturer at the University of West Florida.
“I love working in the float pool. I have the opportunity to see all kinds of patients, from the cardiac unit to respiratory – I was even on oncology one night,” she said. “I just like nursing.”
She believes nursing is her true calling and is grateful that she can help a new generation of nurses establish good habits while getting their bearings in the field. Ultimately, everything she does returns to the foundational experience with her first labor and delivery nurses.
“Nursing is my purpose. And whenever you can live out your purpose – that is so special,” she said.