I am part of a larger system
that allows me to be the nurse
that I've always wanted to be.
We have a promise to our patients
in terms of providing them warm, friendly greetings,
escorts to their destination.
I think if you walk around Rush Copley,
you'll see that it's a family atmosphere.
I'm very proud of what my pharmacists do
to help take care of patients.
They're dropping what they do, changing how they do it,
learning something new to make things work for our patients.
As a patient told me today,
"Wow, everybody here is so happy and friendly,"
and I said, "Listen, you just walked through the doors
of Rush Oak Park Hospital."
We are among the top 10% in the country
for quality and safety.
It's got this small community hospital vibe,
but then it's also got all the resources
of a large academic institution.
And we always want to make sure
everything is taken care of,
so when you leave here and you want to,
you want that person to come back here,
you want the patients to come back.
And we want to stand out and be that place
that everybody wants to come to.
What Rush is is a place that has a tenacious drive
to provide both phenomenal quality and safety
with a great patient experience
by providers at every stage of this organization
who are invested in those outcomes.
I started out here in my training
and stayed on as faculty
and my husband trained here as well, and is still here.
My children go to the day care here,
so it's definitely a family affair for us.
We are developing interprofessional education initiatives.
The university is very focused on experiential learning,
on team-based learning, on interprofessional education.
But people at Rush are just absolutely awesome.
There's some love here that you feel as a student,
so I loved that when I visited and I definitely love it now.
As an Anchor institution,
partnered with other Anchor institutions
on Chicago's West Side and including partnerships
with community leaders and community-based organizations,
we're taking a whole new approach
to addressing historical inequities on Chicago's West Side,
including the social and structural determinants of health,
things like structural racism, poverty,
and educational gaps.
We're calling this new approach West Side United.
That's what the partnering is all about.
It's a bunch of people, institutions,
community-based organizations,
faith-based organizations,
all coming together and having the same goals
and the same strategies to help make life better
for people on the West Side.
It's so important to let people
from communities like mine
to see that there are so many possibilities out there
and it has helped lots of students like me
begin to dream about things that we never thought
we could dream about.
Compassion.
Perseverance.
I can't do it in one word.
Family.
Greatness.
Striving for perfection.
Safety.
Empathy.
Because we are a single integrated system,
we're probably better situated
to transfer that knowledge to practice.
Can we find the best of that
and translate it to the benefit of patients?
We can, and we will.