Jessica Wakeling says she has always felt at home in the emergency department.
“There are two kinds of people: There’s one type of person that runs away from the fire, and then there are others who run right towards it and want to help out with emergency response,” says Wakeling. “And that would be me.”
She says the Master of Health Administration helped her transition to a career in management while still holding on to the values of the team-first environment of the ER.
After years working as an ER registered nurse, Wakeling now serves as a Clinical Operations Director at Langley Memorial Hospital and the Regional Director for the Critical Care Network.
She says the MHA helped her identify which of her ER skills could transfer to a leadership role and what skills she needed to work on.
“There are lots of similarities,” she says of her past and present roles. “You are constantly triaging, like I did in the emergency department, and assessing situations and responding to them. However, as you move up in and through leadership, you have greater accountability. You have to think in a systems lens, not just at the hospital level.”
She says is grateful to have learned from MHA instructors who were working in the health-care field and had “real-life experience.”
During her studies, Wakeling took on a capstone project that focused on human resources in the emergency room. She says the project helped her develop strategies to recruit and retain people who, like her, feel at home in the ER.
Wakeling began the MHA program in 2020 during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Then a new mother, the program gave her the flexibility to juggle her studies with parenthood while colleagues tackled a global health crisis.
She says what she learned in the MHA program prepared her for a leadership role and continues to pay dividends.
“Some of it I used right away and other pieces I’ve returned back to,” she says. “I didn’t know I needed them yet, but now I am accessing them for the future.”