Essentia clinical nurse specialist brings wealth of expertise behind the scenes

Ellen Dyer stood in front of a room of future colleagues during an Essentia Health Nurse Residency Program seminar. Dyer's presentation focused on integrating and sustaining evidence-based practice in nursing — a topic she knows first-hand.

The clinical nurse specialist (CNS) is among a handful of advanced practice nurses who support system-wide safety, quality and cost-effectiveness of patient care through the implementation of evidence-based practice, the integration of knowledge and process improvements.

Dyer is thrilled to work at an organization where she’s encouraged to think outside the box and where improvements are supported.

“It’s a really exciting time to work in this role,” she said, noting that new scientific research is always emerging and processes can always be improved. “I don’t think my job is ever going to go away.”

Helping all areas

Essentia’s clinical nurse specialists support nursing colleagues across all areas, from emergency services and behavioral health, to policy, medical-surgical and more. And they support teams in integrating improvements in those areas.

While Dyer’s specialty is adult-gerontology — the study of aging and older adults — since moving into the CNS role, she has added suicide prevention to her focus area. It’s a health care issue she’s passionate about.

“I’ve had people in my life who have been impacted by suicidal thoughts or have struggled with their mental health, so I can really get behind, ‘We need to work on this and help our patients’ because it can happen to anyone,” she said.

Access to suicide prevention in health care, or after a patient leaves the hospital, can be challenging, Dyer said. Yet she and an interdisciplinary group of colleagues have integrated several changes across Essentia Health.

In tandem with Essentia’s emergency departments, inpatient acute care, outpatient ambulatory areas, as well as nursing leaders and providers, Dyer created a suicide-prevention pathway that involves a safe patient room checklist and a standardized way of determining an evidence-based safety plan.

They’ve also incorporated the Columbia-Suicide Severity Rating Scale (C-SSRS), an evidence-based screening tool used to screen patient risk.They’ve updated Essentia Health patient-facing and internal education materials with person-first language.

“It’s not ‘a suicidal patient.’ It’s ‘a person who is experiencing suicide ideation or suicidal thoughts,’ ” Dyer said.

These changes serve patients and providers, and they help break the stigma around suicide.

“Any little thing you can do to make a change is a positive step forward,” she said.

Dyer grew up in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, where she completed her LPN program a week before graduating high school. She was exposed to the CNS role while completing her RN program at the University of Minnesota.

Dyer secured a paid internship at Essentia as a student CNS during her last year of school. Upon graduation from her doctoral program, she joined the CNS team as its newest clinical nurse specialist.

She said she appreciates Essentia supporting her career development and helping her do what she loves while making a difference.

Working closely in evidence-based practice, there’s endless opportunity to share her processes with others, which Dyer finds rewarding.

“It is really rewarding to be able to share some of my knowledge and skills with others to give them more confidence in speaking up and contributing to process improvements and making our organization a better place for our patients,” she said.