Meet Kristen Hill

by Susan Neale

A Distinguished Recent Alumna Award winner, her passions include patient safety, podcasting and evidence-based practice

Addressing safety issues with EBP

Kristen Hill, DNP, APRN-CNS, AGCNS-BC, (’18 MS) is a clinical nurse specialist at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center who serves transplant patients and dialysis patients. Hill was part of a team dedicated to patient safety at the hospital, particularly how to reduce the risk of patient falls. 

“How could we use what was already available, make it applicable to our patient population and make it easier for our nurses? That was really the idea,” Hill explained. After doing a deep dive into the literature on available tools and scales to help them triage patients at risk, they found some valuable techniques and applied to the Helene Fuld Health Trust National Institute for Evidence-based Practice in Nursing and Healthcare for a grant. The grant helped the team educate and engage nurses in the new processes. The team has seen improved patient safety using a more efficient tool.

Becoming a leader

“I’m still growing as a leader,” Hill said, admitting that implementing new plans at work helped her learn valuable leadership tactics. For instance: “A lot of things that I do boil down to clearer paths of communications. Understanding the ‘why.’ Everybody needs the why. And they need to know why that why is important.”

Another lesson she learned was to listen to critics. “Getting the naysayers – the ones who are most likely to knock down your plan – to be part of your implementation team is important.”

Big dreams 

“I always have big dreams and big aspirations to do things,” Hill said, adding that she’s learning to not be afraid to fail. An adjunct instructor of clinical practice, she hopes to teach more in the future and, toward that goal, completed her DNP this year. Meanwhile she does a lot of outreach as a committee member of the National Association of Clinical Nurse Specialists  and other national organizations. She aspires to work at the national level, influencing CNS practice. She’s also a mom of two: Derek (12) and Adrienne (9).

Podcasting for the parking lot crowd

In her spare time, Hill creates a weekly 10-minute podcast for her fellow healthcare providers. Her podcast, “Kristen’s Kernels,” was inspired by the bus ride between the remote parking lot where many of her colleagues leave their cars and the Ohio State Wexner Medical Center. “It’s 10 minutes that people can’t get back,” she said. Why not give people something useful to do with that time? 

She asked medical center staff for healthcare topics they were curious to learn more about and challenged herself to find topics from A to Z. “What does it really mean to have an occipital lobe injury?” or insomnia, neutropenia or kidney stones, to name a few. Hill calls the short, informative podcast a kind of “organic learning” that listeners can absorb on the fly. 

She carves out a few hours a week to research and record it, encouraged by a lot of positive feedback from her peers. “I try to prioritize things, not just things I enjoy, but things that are meaningful. And this is definitely meaningful.”