Heart Behind the White Coat | Sickle Cell Expert Maya Bloomberg, APRN
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In this program:
Hematology nurse practitioner Maya Bloomberg shares her professional journey as a bedside nurse to becoming a provider and advocate for sickle cell patients in this Heart Behind the White Coat (HBWC) program. Watch as she shares how her patients’ pain and disparities motivated her to advocate for sickle cell care and her advice to aspiring medical students and nurse practitioners.
Transcript
Maya Bloomberg, APRN:
So I started my professional journey as a bedside nurse. I worked on a medsurg telemetry unit, and I cared for countless patients of different diagnoses, including those of sickle cell. It became very obvious early on that they were doctors who just treated patients like numbers. I loved being a nurse, but I could see how nurses get burnt out, so I knew I wanted to advance my profession, but I didn't know what. So I became a family nurse practitioner, I picked FNP because it covered birth, took that, and I thought it would be my training, I would figure out what specialty and area of focus I wanted. So when I became a nurse practitioner I was looking for my first job, again, my biggest criteria was working with a provider who truly cared about the patients more so than the specific specialty. So lo and behold I met Dr. Thomas Harrington, who was the sickle cell specialist in South Florida. And he definitely is the one who ignited my passion in sickle cell, so when I was a bedside nurse, I would see my sickle cell patients and I really only saw the pain and the anemia then when I became a nurse practitioner and started caring for patients in the outpatient setting, I started to see a whole new world of sickle cell and realized what it encompassed, how it really entails the head to toe complications. Just the fact that these warriors were such amazing people, and I had such a different misconception in my head of what a sickle cell patient was when I saw all of my patients who really were making their appointments and doing whatever they can to keep out of the hospital. When I started seeing my patients get mistreated in the emergency room that's when I started realizing I need to do more and help advocate for this wonderful group of patients because there wasn't enough advocacy going on, and we need to have that voice and be the voice for them to bring change. So I think there's a lot of advocacy on the patient front, but we need it more on the provider front, so I had an amazing mentor so Dr. Harrington I have to give credit for a lot of my passion in sickle cell and the two of us have really done a lot together to advocate and bring change for our patients, but more recently, I would say, I started advocating and educating using my social media platform because during the pandemic in February of last year, there was an article that she highlighted the health disparities in COVID, where we saw that Americans and people of color having a spike in complications and deaths to COVID compared to Caucasian or white Americans, so I was trying to think how can I use my expertise to kind of bridge this disparity and lo and…
…behold, came my social media page, thehemeNP, because again, when it comes to sickle cell, adults are going to get connected to a sickle cell specialist, so I wanted to use my platform as a way to provide education on sickle cell in an interesting way because all of us are glued to our cell phones and always on Instagram and social media, so I thought it captured a very important age group of that transition period since we see spike in mortality in that 18 to 25. So I thought using my expertise and using social media would help give patients education in an interesting way, you should check on my reels, they're really entertaining, let me tell you, but ultimately it's providing you with education that you otherwise might not have gotten, even my patients...I can only go over so much in a clinic appointments that it's a good way for me to just educate on all things hematology, sickle cell, birth control, pregnancy, family planning, complications and all that, so patients can learn and be their best advocates.
Well, in January 2020, I had twin newborns. The pandemic happened in March of 2020, so I got to do with a lockdown with three under 2-½ years old. I became a master bread maker, my husband and I can make it through anything, if we can make it through twin newborns and another toddler in a lockdown, I know great so that was a fun experience.
Definitely, I would say as a nurse practitioner, I've seen varying scopes of practice, so in Florida, a nurse practitioner can't practice independently, where I'm from Baltimore, Maryland in Maryland, a nurse practitioner can have their own independent clinic. So in Florida, I think it's important to make sure you're practicing for your full scope, I mean you shouldn't be a doctor's assistant, you shouldn't be their scribe, I think you need to give yourself your own value and know what your worth is and make sure you find a job that aligns with what your passion and goals truly are.
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