Audio Interviews and Transcripts

Interview with Katelyn Geiger
by Hailey Gilmore

This is the interview Hailey conducted with her cousin, Katelyn Geiger. Katelyn earned her nursing degree from Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire in 2008. She chose to be a pediatric nurse because she enjoys children and working with them made her feel more hopeful than working, for example, with the elderly. In her interviews both with Katelyn and her mother, Hailey found that nurses faced under/ overstaffing, problems with insurance, and a deep concern with ethical patient care. You can read a part of the interview below in the transcript typed out by the student or listen to the full interview in the audio player below.


Hailey: Interviewed my mom…she talked about how overtime, because of insurance, and other things, because of society I guess as a whole, nursing became a little more impersonal. When she started, she would work with the parents, work with the kids, really get attached, but then as she started progressing through time, it sort of got a little more impersonal. Did you feel that at all, or do you think it's still a very personal profession?

Katelyn: I think it’s still very personal, but again I guess I don't really have anything to compare it to. ‘Cause I've just been a nurse for five years and that’s all I've known. But I think that can definitely be affected by where you work, and what kind of floor your on…Sometimes if we had a lot of patients, when we were short staffed… then yeah it got a little impersonal because you know, for a lack of better words, it got dangerous, because we didn't have enough help that we needed, so if a kid was going downhill, we weren't able to pay enough attention to our other patients, we had to focus on that one. So, in times like that yes, it does get impersonal, and that’s what I liked the least about nursing,’cause you always wish you had more time, or less patients so you could give them more of your time…but then also, for those kids that do go downhill, you really get this bond with them. It’s constantly changing depending on what kind of patients you have and what kind of floor you're on, whereas in the ICUs they usually have, at the most three patients each, occasionally one to one, or one to two, and on my floor you would have anywhere from three patients to five patents, and when you have five patients for one nurse…it would just be unsafe, ‘cause you just couldn't focus enough and you were constantly running around. There would be days when I would get there at 6:30 in the morning and I wouldn't pee until three in the afternoon, you never sat down, and those days it was very impersonal. Some days you would be perfectly staffed, and other days you would be running around like a chicken with its head cut off, so it’s always constantly flexing there.