Why I Teach: Dr. Flo Weierbach
Why I Teach: Dr. Flo Weierbach
In this episode of “Why I Teach,” Dr. Flo Weierbach, a seasoned nurse and professor at East Tennessee State University’s College of Nursing, talks with Provost Kimberly D. McCorkle about her journey from providing direct care to teaching the next generation of nurses. With over 40 years of experience, Dr. Weierbach discusses her research on caregiver health, the challenges of rural health care, and the importance of interprofessional education for nurses. She also provides a snapshot of her experience with the Nurse Narratives Initiative.
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Transcript
Dr. Flo Weierbach
So when I think about what's most important that I want my students to learn is: how to be kind, how to share, how to listen, and how to meet people where they're at.
Provost Dr. Kimberly D. McCorkle
Hi, I'm Kimberly McCorkle, Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at East Tennessee State University. From the moment I arrived on this campus, I have been inspired by our faculty, their passion for what they do, their belief in the power of higher education, and the way they are transforming the lives of their students. This podcast is dedicated to them, our incredible faculty at ETSU.
Hear their stories as they tell us "Why I Teach."
In this episode, we will talk with Doctor Flo Weierbach. Dr. Weierbach is a Registered Nurse and professor at East Tennessee State University's College of Nursing. She has over 40 years of nursing experience in providing direct care to individuals and their families in community settings. She has served as the nurse on multiple interprofessional health care teams and has conducted research focused on caregiver health.
Upon completion of her Ph.D., she completed a one-year postdoctoral fellowship focusing on rural communities and chronic health conditions of rural residents at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. Additionally, she was a Rural Health Fellow from 2012 through 2013 for the National Rural Health Association, a member of the American Nurses Association Public Health Scope and Standards Workgroup, and as the founding president of the Rural Nurse Organization Appalachian Region Tri-State Chapter.
Enjoy the show. Dr. Weierbach, welcome to the show.
I start my podcast with the same question for every guest. Take me back to your first day of teaching at ETSU as a faculty member, and looking back on that day, what is one piece of advice that you would have given yourself?
Dr. Flo Weierbach
I think the biggest thing I would say is that I need to relax. When I first entered the building, it was hard to find my office, and I was like, "Where is this?" It’s not what I remembered. And the first day I was in the classroom, I left my jacket in the classroom. So I would say, relax.
Provost Dr. Kimberly D. McCorkle
Yes, always great advice.
You've had an extensive career in nursing with over 40 years of experience. What first drew you to the field, and how has that passion for nursing evolved over the years?
Dr. Flo Weierbach
My mother was a nurse, and she always wanted me to be a nurse. I didn't want to be a nurse, but I was working in a nursing home, going to the community college for a different degree, and recognized how important it was that I was there. And I knew I could do more as a nurse than as an aide.
Over the years, I've evolved to discover and to care for people where they live. When I left the hospital after about eight years, after I got my bachelor's degree, I never looked back. I’ve been in the hospital since then, but very infrequently. So I would say really meeting people where they’re at.
Provost Dr. Kimberly D. McCorkle
What inspired you to transition from direct care to teaching at ETSU College of Nursing?
Dr. Flo Weierbach
I, like I said before, when I was in the hospital, it was one at a time that I was providing care for. Then I moved into the community setting, and it was a family home. Then I further moved into our community action, and it was the community.
What pushed me to teach was the ability to impact students so that they could provide care to individuals, families, and communities.
Provost Dr. Kimberly D. McCorkle
Your research is focused on caregivers, especially those caring for individuals with chronic health conditions. What inspired you to dive into this area and how has this research impacted your teaching?
Dr. Flo Weierbach
When I first moved out of the hospital, I entered the home health arena and at that time it was not like it was now, and we provided care for everyone. And over that decade, things changed and it was harder to do it.
When I was in my Ph.D. program, I was talking to a coworker from Home Health and she
Dr. Flo Weierbach
said to me, "Go find out what people need in the community." That led me to my dissertation work, which told me what I already knew, but I didn’t know I knew in that way. The caregivers were the most important thing.
Yeah, but at the same time, what I saw was that caregivers would die, and we wouldn’t know what to do with their loved ones. Yeah, and that was the call. I hated the absolute most.
And all the caregiving work at that time was around stress. So I decided to look at it differently and to look at it through health and through physiological, physical health and mental health. So that’s kind of like what led me to that. I developed a model. I tested the model. When I tested the model, we saw changes over time in both mental and physical health, which was a little unusual. We weren’t expecting that.
How it's been able to impact my teaching is I teach a graduate-level theory concepts to our master students, and both with, and with our PhD students, that I met her. I've been able to show them how a model works and how to develop a model.
So I think that's how I've been able to use that with my teaching.
Provost Dr. Kimberly D. McCorkle
Well, I imagine this is an area of research that's interesting as well to students.
Dr. Flo Weierbach
I think it is. I think what's interesting, too, is demonstrating how important the community is, demonstrating how important it is that we address health holistically. And in addressing health holistically, we are looking at the entire person, and the model includes four components to health being attitudes and beliefs. So why are we doing it? Why are we providing care?
Oh, it involves tasks that we do as caregivers, such as bathing or feeding or grocery shopping, and involves needs that we have as caregivers, such as help with the lawn, help with finances. And then it also addresses what we as caregivers do for ourselves to maintain healthy. Do we eat healthy? Do we exercise?
And what was most surprising when I looked at it was how important spiritual care was.
Provost Dr. Kimberly D. McCorkle
You were recently able to participate in a wonderful project called the Nurse Narratives Initiative. Will you please share what that project is all about? And a bit about your experience with it?
So the Nurse Narratives project is, it's very interesting, I love it. It brings the arts into the classroom, and it also brings storytelling into the classroom and allows nurses to share our stories about memorable events that have happened throughout her career.
I know for myself, when I was trying to decide on which story I, after 40 years, I have a lot of stories. It was challenging to think about it, and it was also challenging to think about what did I want to emphasize?
So I finally settled on a story that was a home health story that involved very few visits, and I highlighted one aspect of a visit. But it really demonstrates what nurses bring to the table on the farm. It talked about skills. It talked about relationship building. It talked about what you can do with not a lot of resources. And it talked about a health outcome, both for the individual that I was providing care for and also for the husband. Yeah.
Provost Dr. Kimberly D. McCorkle
So I understand that many of your colleagues in the college have also participated in the project.
Dr. Flo Weierbach
Yes. And that that was also lots of fun to be able to work with people that I've not worked with in the past.
I really have enjoyed that aspect of it. Feel like I learned from them and they learned from me. And the team is just, the nurse narrative team is so good at getting us to focus on what was most important.
Yes. I really enjoyed the first kind of presentation of that, and I'm looking forward to hearing more of the narratives. It's great.
Provost Dr. Kimberly D. McCorkle
What type of work are you currently doing now at ETSU?
Dr. Flo Weierbach
So currently in addition to teaching... So I teach across programs. I teach undergraduate community health, which I just absolutely love. It's great fun to see students realize that there's health care outside of a hospital setting.
I teach graduate master students and then Ph.D. students, but in addition to that, I've been doing some research work. We had a legislative meeting last August with the Tennessee Nurses Association, District Five. And out of that, a topic came up that the legislators were interested in and that was looking at workplace violence for nurses.
Yeah, nasty topic for real, and at the same time, workplace well-being has become very important. So a bunch of us that are nursing faculty, we are working with the Tennessee Center for Nursing Advancement on a research project identifying well-being and workplace violence in the state, which is just phenomenal.
We've contacted the legislators that are there. They are interested in it. They want to know what's going on. They can't do anything with policy until they know what's going on. So I'm really proud of that work.
We have a Ph.D. student working with us. And then the other that I've been working with is the ALS clinic I've been working with. And the social worker and I have been working on a project looking at my health model for caregivers, using secondary data to identify needs of caregivers.
Those are two fun projects, along with the continual work that I'm doing with the Interprofessional Education Center with Dr. Brian Cross. In addition to the work that I'm currently doing with interprofessional practice, I'm also working with the team to develop a pilot study that will hopefully be funded.
We're going to put it in probably late summer, early fall, addressing frailty and elders. And that's an interdisciplinary team involving two disciplines out of the College of Health Sciences, the College of Pharmacy, the College of Public Health, and myself.
So excited about that. I love doing interprofessional work.
So lots of fun stuff in addition to teaching. Oh, it's great.
I look forward to hearing about those projects.
Provost Dr. Kimberly D. McCorkle
Rural communities often face unique health challenges. What are some of the most pressing issues you've encountered in rural health care, and how is ETSU preparing our nursing students to deal with those challenges?
Dr. Flo Weierbach
I think the biggest challenge I've seen is transportation. Access is always important, but if you have a health care center in a rural place, that's great. But if there's no transportation, they can't get there. So I would say transportation, and along with transportation, is the regionalization of specialties. If people have to drive long distances, they probably don't know where they're going. They're a little scared of the big city, even though this is not a big city, they're a little scared of it.
And there are ways that we can bring people into the community, and bring health care into the community through churches, through work in clubs. And I would like to see a little bit more of that, that we reach people where they're at instead of making people come to us. But I would say the biggest challenge I see is transportation. And then right next to that is what we consider to be deserts. We see food deserts where there are no grocery stores. And we also see pharmacy deserts where there's no pharmacy.
Provost Dr. Kimberly D. McCorkle
And I've observed that our students tend to be very interested in working to address those challenges.
Dr. Flo Weierbach
Yes, they do. We've had students, undergraduate students in some of our distant clinic sites for the College of Nursing, and it's my understanding we have that again. A few years ago, we had our graduate FNP students, we had some scholarships that addressed that.
A lot of our students want to work in their communities. We have a graduate course right now that clearly addresses underserved communities and underserved populations, which have been a focus of the college in our state for a long time.
Provost Dr. Kimberly D. McCorkle
The College of Nursing also maintains a number of nurse-led clinics in rural communities. Can you tell us a bit about that work?
Dr. Flo Weierbach
So our clinics are phenomenal. A couple of years ago, I was the project director for a HRSA grant and we took our senior undergraduate students during their clinical practicum, the last course they take, and we put them into the clinics. The students loved it. They shadowed the nurse. No, they didn’t shadow. They were the nurse. Oh, in the clinics, the clinics embraced them.
The outcomes that we had from that were phenomenal. Our NCLEX pass rates were higher than the class average. And some of the other programs that had this grant, they cherry-picked their students. We didn’t. We just had some really great students. They wanted to be in the program. They wanted to do the rural work. And what's more important is we've had great outcomes out of that.
So we had, I can't remember exactly how many students that were in that program. But I do know that our outcomes are: We've had at least two FNPs, who have stayed in rural practice and at least one, if not 2 or 3, that went into our Family Partnership program. Our Nurse Family Partnership Program is an evidence-based program that helps at-risk mothers with newborns.
And they follow, the nurse, follows the mother and the child up until two years of age. We have the largest rural footprint in the country with that program. Yeah, our clinic, we're just phenomenal. We have our master students in there. Oh, our psychiatric mental health program, we always have a lot of students that are interested in that.
It allows us to have placement for our students and allows them to look at it in a professional team, especially those that are in the Johnson City area who serve the homeless population at the Day Center. And after our community center, because there are large interprofessional teams in those areas.
Provost Dr. Kimberly D. McCorkle
How do you teach nursing students the importance of working in teams, especially in rural or underserved settings?
Dr. Flo Weierbach
I already mentioned the interprofessional education that we do. Our nursing students, our undergraduate students, work with the on-ground model of interprofessional education, which is our team-based. So not only are they learning about how to work in teams, but they're also in a team.
Then for our graduate students, we have an asynchronous, completely online model. Again, they're working in teams. Yeah. Oh, and we also encourage our students to attend the ALS clinic with me. Which is awesome when they do, because not only are they seeing a team of professionals practicing, but there's also other students there. So they learn that also.
So, all of our clinics focus on teamwork. Oh, and we focus heavily on teamwork within our graduate program, which is what I have more experience with than our undergraduate.
For our Ph.D. students, we have them work on research teams. And I know the research teams that I work with are interprofessional. I just also finished up and I'm finishing up a project that involved three different colleges at the university: Arts and Sciences, the Appalachian Center, Clemmer College, and Nursing. We looked at the role of the school nurse along with Public Health, because we included vaping, around the transition from middle school to high school.
Interesting. Yeah. So IP is really woven throughout the curriculum of nursing, isn't it? Yeah, it is. And we're increasing that, bringing more of our students on board and looking at how we can include everyone in the college.
In the fall, we are going to take our nursing education students, our graduate nursing education students, and have them work with faculty in the IPE program to mentor them, to demonstrate how to teach IPE.
Provost Dr. Kimberly D. McCorkle
That's great. Yeah, I had not heard about that. Really interesting.
Dr. Flo Weierbach
Yeah. We've piloted this year with some of our public health students and the public health faculty, but we're going to roll it out in the fall. I'm one of the IPE liaisons.
Provost Dr. Kimberly D. McCorkle
Fantastic.
Finally, what impact do you hope you've made on your students?
Dr. Flo Weierbach
Gosh, I think that this was one of the most challenging questions for me. Yeah. As a nurse, I think the most important thing to do is to listen and be present.
So when I think about what's most important that I want my students to learn, it is: how to be kind, how to share, how to listen, and how to meet people where they're at because not everyone is at the same place. But if we can, as nurses, figure out where they're at, we can meet their needs.
Provost Dr. Kimberly D. McCorkle
Dr. Weierbach, thank you so much for joining us today on "Why I Teach." Your wealth of knowledge and dedication to nursing, caregiving, and rural health is truly inspiring, and it's clear that your work has made a profound impact on both the communities you serve and the students you mentor.
Thanks for listening to "Why I Teach." For more information about Dr. Weierbach, the College of Nursing, or this podcast series, visit the ETSU Provost website at ETSU.edu/Provost.
You can follow me on social media at ETSU Provost. And if you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to like and subscribe to "Why I Teach" wherever you listen to podcasts.
East Tennessee State University was founded in 1911 with a singular mission: to improve the quality of life for people in the region and beyond. Through its world-class health sciences programs and interprofessional approach to health care education, ETSU is a highly respected leader in rural health research and practices. The university also boasts nationally ranked programs in the arts, technology, computing, and media studies. ETSU serves approximately 14,000 students each year and is ranked among the top 10 percent of colleges in the nation for students graduating with the least amount of debt.
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