By the time Cathcart came to nursing, she was in her mid-30s, a mom, and on her second career. The combination of business experience, parenting perspective, and long-held passion for pediatrics prepared her well to lead the nurses who care for the smallest, most critically ill babies.
At Mission Bay, we’ll have three times the space to care for our patients and their loved ones. And all the rooms will be single, so families will be able to stay overnight with their infants.
As ICN manager at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital, Cathcart oversees a highly trained team that partners with some of the world’s most experienced neonatal specialists. Their patients are preemies and other babies born with multiple, serious health complications, often requiring complex surgery. Among the first of its kind in the world when it was created in 1964, UCSF’s ICN now treats more than 1,000 infants each year and maintains one of the country’s largest neonatal heart programs.
For all the talent on staff, UCSF’s ICN is uniquely nonhierarchical, Cathcart says. Nurses are prized players in a team effort dedicated to getting sick babies healthy and home. Quality and safety standards are exceptionally high. And in a crowded, 50-bed nursery overflowing with equipment, the pace can be overwhelming; the anxiety of worried parents, palpable. Extraordinary measures are an everyday occurrence when you’re providing post-surgical care for a preemie so small she fits in a shoebox, or teaching frightened new parents to administer treatment at home. It’s at times like these that an ICN nurse must be both superheroic and deeply, compassionately human.
Supporting nurses and coaching them to make a difference is the core of Cathcart’s job. “I make sure they have the resources to concentrate 100 percent at the bedside,” she says. “I try to buffer them from families who feel helpless, or even angry, in the face of their child’s uncertain future. And I like to help new grads become not just competent but excellent nurses.”
The rewards of such work include the privilege of being present in a family’s life when they finally take home a baby that has required above-and-beyond care since birth. Each year, Cathcart looks forward to October, when the real superheroes emerge: Kids who began life hooked up to high-tech machines, wearing tiny preemie watch caps, return in capes and face paint and crazy wigs for a Halloween homecoming. And the ICN is filled with their laughter.
