A Champion in Scrubs

Nurse Extraordinaire Shannon Nachtigal Retires

The 1893 Florence Nightingale Pledge, a Hippocratic Oath for nurses, reads in part: “I will do all in my power to maintain and elevate the standard of my profession … With loyalty will I endeavor to aid the physician in his work and devote myself to the welfare of those committed to my care.” It’s an apt description of one of the most honorable professions in healthcare and the very essence of what Shannon Nachtigal, former chief nursing officer for Baxter Health, has aspired to be her entire career. “I have an absolute love for the nurses and the profession of nursing,” she said. “I feel like for any chief nursing officer, the key to success is to love the people you lead and make sure they know it.”

Nachtigal grew up in the tiny town of Peel, Arkansas, and graduated from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock School of Nursing in 1989. Her first assignment was a world away from the smaller confines of Baxter Health, both in size and in spirit. “Before I came to Baxter, going to nursing school in Little Rock and doing clinicals in all the different hospitals, I was petrified of nurses,” she said. “They were horrible to students. It was all a horrible experience, and I remember thinking then that I would never treat a student or a trainee the way I was treated. “When I came to what was going to be a ’little rural hospital’ in the Ozarks, I was absolutely amazed at the quality of the patient care here and the nurses. I wanted to learn everything I could from them because they were so smart and they were so wonderful. I thought, ’Little Rock doesn’t have anything on this hospital.’”

Welcoming environment aside, Nachtigal understood that at age 20 and with virtually no experience providing care to adults, there was a lot she had to do to prove herself. She resolved to soak up every ounce of expertise she could from the veteran nurses. And while her formal education would eventually land her bachelor’s and master’s degrees, she considers those opening months of her Baxter Health career as the most formative.

“One of the first things I was taught when I followed my first nurse around here who trained me was not to just look at the patient as far as what problem brought them to the hospital, but to look at the entire head-to-toe assessment and their whole story,” she said. “She taught me to approach patients from a holistic point of view, meaning, the patient might be there specifically for pneumonia, but what does their whole body system look like? How does their heart sound? How does their belly sound? Doing that, versus just going in, listening to their lungs, passing out medications and walking back out, is what it meant to take care of them completely.”

Nachtigal’s first assignment was on the night shift at 2 West, now 3 West. The hospital was much smaller than today, but the life-and-death responsibilities of her profession loomed just as large. “At that time, we did not have a south tower,” she said. “We had two medical surgical units, 3 West and 2 West, and then we had an ICU. Our ER was in a completely different spot. We only had four emergency rooms; now we have 21. We were under 100 beds then, and now we’re licensed for 268.”

Her work ethic, coachability and obvious love for what she did was a magnet for promotions. Within three months, the nurse leader moved her from night shift to days to train for a relief charge position. From there, she’d serve as charge nurse, house nursing supervisor and nurse manager, all within the span of her first couple of years. Five years later, then-Chief Nursing Officer Margaret Fielding made her an assistant vice president to help keep up with the burgeoning growth of the hospital. Briefly moving to California, Nachtigal would return to Baxter in a role created specifically for her to manage the patient experience.

“I came in, and I worked hard to elevate our patient experience scores. We shot to the top after a lot of education and a lot of work with the directors and staff,” she said. After that, Nachtigal was put in charge of the float pool, which under her leadership increased from eight to 80 people, before taking a leave of absence to care for her daughter. She’d return as a nurse educator, but it wouldn’t last as President and CEO Ron Peterson would soon approach her in 2014 with the opportunity to become interim chief nursing officer. It was a major decision and a role not everyone in her life voted for.

“My friends were like, ’Don’t do it, we’ll never see you again,’” she said. “But I felt like the hospital was not in a good place at that time, especially with nursing, and I felt like I could make a difference. I still had such a passion for nursing, so I said I would do it. I think within six months, he transitioned me into the role full time. I thought I would do it for three to five years and ended up in my ninth year. Thank goodness I have had such great family support.”

One of the things that drove Nachtigal hardest in her capacity as chief nursing officer was her ironclad belief that nursing was best carried out according to a demanding code of personal and professional conduct in service to patients and one another. She resolved to coach up or root out those who couldn’t or wouldn’t aspire to meet those standards.

“When I started my career in 1989, there was at least one nurse in every unit of every hospital who was known as the Cruella de Vil, if you will,” she said. “My goal was to remove that bully-type nurse from our culture and create a culture of not only love for the patients but love for one another.” It’s sometimes difficult over a long career to pick out one pinnacle accomplishment, but for Nachtigal, the ultimate achievement is fairly easy to identify. In June 2021, after years of paperwork, staff training and process improvement, she led the nurses of Baxter Health to achieve Magnet® status, an international designation that represents the highest honor any hospital’s nursing program can attain. A nearly unheard-of achievement in small hospitals — and in Baxter’s case, done entirely in-house, without paid consultants — Magnet® status was a global accomplishment of such mammoth proportions and scope that the full effect of it still hasn’t sunk in. “I had such a strong nursing leadership team who every time we met a barrier and were told the journey stops here, we just never accepted that to be true,” she said. “We would dig and investigate and figure out a way around. Then we would truck along until we hit the next brick wall. “I think all the things we had to go through, go around, go over, really made us strong as a partnership, as a team. It just comes back to the culture. It comes back to the heart of the nurses and their fortitude and perseverance to put our name on the map. I don’t know that my elation over that accomplishment will ever go away.”

As Nachtigal stepped into retirement this year, she did so with a clear sense of leaving things finished and positioned for the next generation to take over and carry forward. Life in nursing wasn’t always easy — no one’s journey this side of the hereafter ever is — but she leaves knowing her contribution to the profession and her charges elevated Baxter’s nursing care to the highest degree possible in a place she loves dearly. “I have always felt supported by this hospital, from the day I walked in the door to the day I walked out,” she said. “This hospital allowed me to support my family; it fed and clothed my kids. When I had some hard times, like the death of a husband and a child who got gravely ill, I never felt like they weren’t right there for me. They were bringing meals to my house. They all got together and wrote notes in a journal for me. They would just show up. I get tearful thinking about it. “So, when I got the opportunity to lead them and build something special, I wanted to do it. I never really aspired to do this job, but I felt it was my way to give back to the people who had given me so much.”