Jacq Attacqs: Sustainable Health Storytelling

It's Personal

I used to roll my eyes at the term “professional development." Another checkbox. Another email to answer. Another expectation layered onto an already overwhelming job.

In truth, I think I was always wary of wastefulness—time, money, energy. I’d seen too many examples of PD programs that felt hollow or performative: in hospitals, college systems, and businesses alike. Still, over the years—through a winding professional journey that includes nursing, nannying, research, tutoring, slinging smoothies and coffee, and more—I’ve come to realize something important: Usually, requirements exist for a reason. Usually.

Just last week, I connected with a brilliant nurse manager from Charlotte, NC, and something clicked. I realized that what I often experienced as never-ending demands were actually efforts to challenge and support me professionally, to align my strengths and abilities with institutional goals. Beyond the checklists, management's goal is to bolster their most engaged employees. Never one to fly under the radar, I often felt scrutinized and highly-visible, and therefore so were my professional choices and mistakes. I now understand how much that visibility matters—and how often it leads to opportunity.

But let’s be honest: I didn’t always know how to leverage that power position, and I didn't always take it as a compliment. Being inquisitive and energetic can be annoying without an outlet. I wasn’t always taken seriously, but had very high performance expectations. To enact real change, I had to grow—and that meant learning how to communicate my passion productively, speak the language of leadership, and understand the systems I was trying to influence.

"Professional development."

Put simply: you can’t expect your career to grow if you don’t grow within your career. And that growth—personal, professional—it's messy; it's nonlinear. It takes time. It takes the right tools. And if you are lucky, you can align your personal and professional goals by pulling the right levers at work. My levers revealed themselves after a long search, and I'm still finding new ones to pull every day.

From the Bedside to the Landfill

Let me back up. I’ve been a bedside nurse since 2020 at Stanford Health Care, working in the Nursing Float Pool. We support all Adaptive Acuity Units: around 22 Medical-Surgical and Specialty units capable of escalating patient care without having to change the care team. If a patient now requires increased nursing interventions, like telemetry heart monitoring for example (i.e., their acuity changes), they don't have to change rooms or medical teams. So, I’ve floated everywhere for 5 years—ortho-trauma, cardiac surgery, bone marrow transplant, even a stint on light-duty with Nursing Excellence putting on Nurse's Week and Nursing Education auditing some infection prevention requirements. I have learned to care for diverse, complex patients across acuity levels and specialties.

The training was, of course, intense. And like most nurses, I was too busy during those early shifts to even register my own bladder reaching critical capacity. But one thing I couldn’t ignore? The sheer volume of supply waste created during nursing care. No matter the unit, the story was the same: unopened, unused, and discarded supplies. Everywhere. Room after room. Bag after bag. Thrown into landfills without a second thought.

When I finally got my bearings enough in the career to try to address this issue, I ran quite immediately into roadblocks. I had first asked to start a Sustainability Champion role in the Float Pool. The idea? Just independent research and sharing of some information during staff huddles. But even that didn’t get off the ground. Other "Nurse Champion" roles were well-established, like for patient fall prevention and staff bonding opportunities, but Sustainability? Too new. Too big. Too complicated. Too… taboo?

My ideas came at rapid fire, but were DOA.

“Yes!” turned into “Well…”

“Maybe!” became “Not a priority this quarter.”

And often, I received just “No.”

It was discouraging. So I turned inward—focused on reducing waste in my personal life, started taking plastic packaging from work back home to recycle, and assumed that was the end of it. I didn't understand how to speak the language I needed to get my voice heard and make change. And the system was built around the waste, so much so that it seemed it could never be deconstructed and redesigned again, better.

*Cue sad Jacquie music!!*

A Fork in the Road

Serendipitously, in 2022, Stanford’s Sustainability Program Office announced a program years in the making: a chance for frontline staff to lead sustainability projects. Thus began the first-ever RN Fellowship in Sustainability. My then-manager, probably excited to get me off his back, forwarded me the application. I applied with a project idea focused on unused supply waste—and I got in!

In 2023, I investigated unused bedside supplies discarded at discharge. Sampling 25 rooms and scaling up to the estimated ~30,000 annual discharges at Stanford, I uncovered:

• the opportunity to reduce ~ 30 tons of landfill waste

• cost-savings opportunity of $850,000+ annually

All from items never used for or even touched by a patient.

Using that data, I launched a pilot to assess staff buy-in to supply re-collection efforts, which showed promise but left many questions still unanswered: who would be responsible for supply collection? Who would check if the bins are full? Where do the supplies even go after we collect them?

The demand became even higher for nurses' input on the supply waste process. I shared my findings at Nursing Grand Rounds, Shared Leadership Council, and across Stanford’s (siloed) "Green Teams". The foundational research helped shape the direction of the next cohort of RN Sustainability Fellows that continues today. This work even contributed to Stanford's 5th Magnet™  Redesignation—a prestigious title from the ANCC recognizing top-tier, innovative nursing care.

CleanMed and Real Impact

By recommendation of my Sustainability advisors, I attended my first professional conference: CleanMed 2024 in Salt Lake City. It was the first time I met like-minded healthcare workers deeply engaged in sustainability. It blended my love for taking a break from the bedside in a new city, with connecting to other professionals in this niche space. Very inspired by the experience, I decided to make it an annual thing.

Now, I’m writing this reflection post- my second CleanMed—Atlanta 2025. Yet again I am humbled by the work that has already been done, and inspired by all the room left to grow in this field. I want to make an impact. I’m aligning my professional development with sustainability goals—through educational growth, attending conferences, harnessing existing professional teams, and enacting change within my practice.

In Spring 2025, I began an MPA in Sustainability at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. I was recently elected to the Research and Innovation Council within Stanford’s Shared Leadership Council, where I hope to steer the tides of research toward sustainable health practices. I've also applied some of this Sustainability work toward advancement to Clinical Nurse IV, which is the top level of the Professional Nurse Development ladder where I carry a bit more weight in conversations with other nurse professionals about my work.

This year, CleanMed presenter Karen Ceresnak, an RN from Stanford Children's Hospital, shared her results in Optimizing Pediatric ICU Bedside Carts for Sustainability. Inspired by a talk I gave to her Green Team last year, she applied a similar methodology to her supply carts and was able to reduce $850,000 in annual supply waste, equating 11 tons of waste (~22,000lbs!) reduced from landfills.

Aren’t nurses amazing?

The themes I gleaned from this year's CleanMed talks include:

Enhancing communication.

Clinician-led teams. 

Leadership buy-in.

Financial justification of the work.

The Storytelling Tool

At CleanMed 2025, I finally found a solution that doesn't leave me pounding against walls (metaphorically and literally). I'd been chasing numbers, policies, requirements and spreadsheets—but stories are what move hearts, and can move budgets. Storytelling is how we reach people.

As a lifelong academic and scientific explorer, I am fluent in the language of numbers and facts. I see patterns and abstract concepts easily. I find value in scientific research and can scrutinize conflicting information. But many stakeholders—patients, clinicians, executives—aren’t convinced by spreadsheets or a scientific poster alone. They respond to stories.

Most people do not understand a nurse's work, nor the inner workings of any profession they themselves do not directly perform. Especially in brand new arenas, like a nurse's role in sustainability, the work is uncharted. It’s slow-moving, despite clear interest and dire need. And it’s made all the harder in Trump’s America. But it's critical.

I (and other, much smarter professionals in the space) have realized that data alone doesn’t convince people like it used to—which lends support to writing more anecdotally, such as long-winded nurses sharing their sustainability, et al. thoughts in blog format. In the post-fact era, real stories can engage all of the political spectrum. Stories also build connection with leadership. So in order to progress in this space, we need to use storytelling as a tool to persuade our stakeholders to invest in this work.

Why Storytelling Matters Now

In 2024, the United Nations declared climate change a global health emergency. If we want to protect our patients, we must acknowledge how environmental harm worsens health disparities. Our work as nurses doesn’t end at the bedside anymore—we must respond to the needs of a changing planet. And stories move people in a way numbers can’t.

We must tell stories that build bridges—across departments, across silos, across political lines. Because stories bring people together. Stories open doors. Stories are how change begins.

So here I am, telling mine. I can't wait to hear Yours!

—Jacquie, BSN, RN-BC, MEDSURG-BC, MPA Sustainability Candidate

Float Pool Nurse | Sustainability RN Fellow 2023 | Nurse Ecologist