Celebrating Our People – Meet Heather

Nurse practitioner Heather Smith has learned a lot about her patients and their barriers to health care by simply taking the time to talk.

Smith, who works in the gastroenterology department at Saint Joseph East in Lexington, is known for not rushing her patients.

“A lot of times I sit down in the room with a patient in a chair, talking to them like I’m their friend, because I think it’s important for them to feel heard, and to feel reassured and to understand and know the plan for their care,” said Smith, Advanced Practice Provider of the Year at her hospital. “That’s how I would want to be treated and my family be treated. So I try to treat everyone as if they were my loved one.”

Besides building a rapport that helps with patient care, that communication leads to learning about their lives and the struggles they have that may impede their treatment, Smith said, such as lack of transportation to appointments or financial constraints.

“You kind of learn what barriers your patients have when you sit down and talk with them. I feel like you can treat them better that way as well,” she said. “It makes me feel like I want to break down those barriers somehow. I reach out to case management a lot to see if they can help in any way. And it makes me try my best to take care of them also after their hospitalization.”

The conversations are not filled with medical jargon if she can avoid it, something she has learned from both her patients and colleagues.

In health care, communication in general is so important, she added, “not just patients, but to each other— staff, nurses, other consulting groups. I think a lot of things get lost in communication because we are rushed; we live in a society where we are so rushed.”

Smith knew going into college at University of Kentucky that she wanted a career in a helping field, such as teaching, social work or nursing. ”I landed on nursing because it gives you a variety of ways to help people.”

She has been a nurse practitioner since 2016, starting as a float provider in the Saint Joseph system in family medicine before joining the gastroenterology group at Saint Joseph East in 2019. Prior to that, she was an emergency room nurse at Saint Joseph in Lexington for five years. 

Smith decided to become a nurse practitioner, getting her master’s degree in family practice from Eastern Kentucky University, “because I wanted to take care of the whole person; I felt like in the ER, I was just managing their acute emergency problem as a nurse. I wanted to be more of the provider and the  caretaker, and take care of people from start to finish, including prevention. I wanted to be first-line care.”

Smith also has a reputation for being calm in the middle of chaos — an attitude that was forged in part by her ER work, but also in the realization that “ultimately we can help better when that adrenaline is used in a calmer fashion. I feel like being calm and cool is the best way to take care of patients.” 

Smith said she tries her best to practice Saint Joseph’s values daily with her patients: “We need to be open, to realize we all come from different walks of life — we’re not all the same, we have different histories, different socioeconomic statuses, different jobs, different social lives. And we should be respectful of everyone and take care of everyone the best we can.

“We have a duty to our community and our patients to treat them in the best way possible, and that’s just with kindness. And I think when people feel kindness, they will feel better overall, whatever their diagnosis is.”

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