Stacy Smith, who earned her DNP from the College of Nursing in August, received the Mary Reardon Castles Award for her project, which focused on decreasing wait times in the emergency department for pediatric sexual assault victims. (Photo courtesy of UMSL College of Nursing)
When Stacy Smith first enrolled in the Doctor of Nursing Practice program at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, she thought the degree – the highest level of academic preparation in nursing practice – would help her move up the career ladder as an educator. After over 20 years working as a pediatric nurse, Smith had recently transitioned to the classroom, working as an assistant professor of nursing at MidAmerica Nazarene University in Olathe, Kansas, from 2019 to 2024.
But as Smith moved through the DNP program in UMSL’s College of Nursing, it quickly became clear to her that she wanted to pursue a career as a nurse practitioner instead. As she started to focus on the pediatric acute care population, diving into disease processes and pharmacology and spending time at the bedside, she found herself wanting to take care of pediatric patients again – just in a different capacity.
“It did surprise me a little bit because I loved teaching, but I also loved being at the bedside,” Smith said. “I just had to weigh my pros and cons of what I wanted to pursue career-wise. What did I want to do for a longer period of time? I decided to go back to the bedside and pursued the nurse practitioner side of it.”
After recognizing that she wanted to return to bedside practice, Smith decided to pursue her DNP with a pediatric nurse practitioner emphasis. Over her four years in the program, a few pediatric professors left the college, but she said several other nursing faculty members stepped up and dove into the pediatric population as best they could. Assistant Teaching Professor Charity Galgani – who served as chair for Smith’s DNP project – and Associate Teaching Professor Britt Phillips both supported Smith throughout the program, while Interim Director of Clinical Operations Jinnie Tkach, who has a background in pediatrics, provided guidance specific to the pediatric population.
Smith leaned on her own background in pediatrics for her DNP project, which focused on decreasing wait times in the emergency department for pediatric sexual assault victims. Almost two years ago, Smith started working as a sexual assault nurse examiner and was struck by how long victims would sit in the waiting room – sometimes up to seven hours.
Her quality-improvement project aimed to reduce emergency department wait times for those victims by transitioning from an on-call model, in which nurses were on call for shifts 24/7 and would get paged when patients came in, with an hour report time – to an on-site model with 24/7 in-house coverage. Across 90 patients over 12 weeks, average wait time decreased from 44 minutes to just 10 minutes, marking a 77% reduction in wait time following implementation of the on-site model. For those patients, Smith said, such a decrease in wait time can make a world of difference.
“You’re talking about a pediatric patient that has been sexually assaulted, which is very traumatizing, and then to have to sit in a waiting room full of crying babies, or upset parents, or anxiety-driven parents, just exacerbates the situation,” Smith said. “Being able to get those patients back into a private space, being able to use trauma-informed care to take care of them in a quicker manner, hopefully alleviated some of that anxiety and trauma that they had already experienced.”
Smith was recognized for her work during the College of Nursing’s Awards and Pinning Ceremony in August, when she received the Mary Reardon Castles Award for her project. The recognition was both surprising and rewarding.
“I’m not really a QI researcher person, but I really threw myself into this project,” Smith said. “Getting that award was surprising, but it was an honor that they recognized the hard work and were willing to recognize me in front of my peers and my family for the hard work that I had accomplished.”
On the heels of earning her DNP in August, Smith is embarking on a new chapter. This week, she starts a new position as a pediatric nurse practitioner on the pediatric hospital medicine team at Children’s Mercy in Kansas City. After more than two decades working as a nurse, she’s looking forward to taking care of patients in a higher capacity, and her DNP education has her feeling confident going into the new role.
“I feel like the education really built on itself as the years went by so that when I got to my clinical experience, I felt comfortable,” Smith said. “I still had a lot of things to learn – how to flip my brain from a nurse brain to a practitioner brain – but they set me up for success with that as the courses built on each other through the years. I feel confident going into my new role, and I just think that the program as a whole did a great job building my confidence and giving me the education that I needed to feel that confident.”
