In this episode of Elevate Care, Dr. Danielle McCamey discusses the critical role of mentorship in nursing, particularly for nurses of color. She emphasizes the importance of having multiple mentors, each serving different roles in one's career. Dr. McCamey also highlights the mission of DNPs of Color, an organization she founded to support nurses of color through networking, mentorship, and advocacy. The conversation explores strategies for finding mentors, being a good mentee, and creating inclusive environments in nursing.
In this episode of Elevate Care, Dr. Danielle McCamey discusses the critical role of mentorship in nursing, particularly for nurses of color. She emphasizes the importance of having multiple mentors, each serving different roles in one's career. Dr. McCamey also highlights the mission of DNPs of Color, an organization she founded to support nurses of color through networking, mentorship, and advocacy. The conversation explores strategies for finding mentors, being a good mentee, and creating inclusive environments in nursing.
Learn more about the show: https://www.amnhealthcare.com/campaign/elevate-care-podcast/
https://www.dnpsofcolor.org/
TIMESTAMPS
00:00 The Importance of Mentorship in Nursing
06:08 Diversity in Nursing and Mentorship
09:45 DNPs of Color: Mission and Impact
12:58 Finding and Being a Good Mentee
18:38 Creating Inclusive Environments in Nursing
20:26 Empowering Nurses as Leaders
ABOUT DR. MCCAMEY
Danielle K. McCamey, DNP, CRNP, ACNP-BC, FCCP, is a seasoned critical care clinician and visionary leader committed to advancing inclusion and belonging in nursing. As the founder of DNPs of Color, she established a global platform that empowers nurses of color through networking, mentorship, and advocacy. Her work through DNPs of Color has increased diverse representation in doctoral nursing practice, catalyzing a transformative shift within the profession. McCamey's leadership extends beyond DNPs of Color. As the co-creator of the Doctoral Nurses Collaborative, she united DNP- and PhD-prepared nurses across her healthcare system, providing invaluable mentorship, promoting evidence-based practice, and amplifying nursing scholarship. She is the assistant dean for strategic partnerships at Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, where she leads initiatives to cultivate and fortify relationships with healthcare organizations, educational institutions, and community partners. Her commitment to excellence extends beyond nursing. As a fellow of the American College of Chest Physicians, she earned numerous accolades and was honored as a Distinguished CHEST Educator for her exceptional contributions to education and critical care. Her influence reaches beyond her professional achievements. She is a highly sought-after speaker and mentor, renowned for her inspirational and motivational insights. McCamey's transformative leadership and pioneering spirit continue to advance the nursing profession
Connect with Dr. McCamey https://www.linkedin.com/in/mccamey/
ABOUT KERRY
Kerry Perez leads the design and development of enterprise strategy in addition to overseeing Marketing, Corporate Communications, and Creative Services.
Ms. Perez joined AMN Healthcare in 2007 and has held various roles during her tenure, including recruitment, marketing, innovation, strategy, and M&A. She most recently served as the company’s Vice President of Enterprise Strategy. She also stood up AMN Healthcare's Diligence and Integration Management Office, which led the strategic and functional integration of new acquisitions to drive synergy. She was named among Staffing Industry Analyst’s Top 40 Under 40 in 2021, and she hosts the AMN Healthcare podcast, Elevate Care.
Ms. Perez maintains the guiding principles of being customer obsessed, thinking big and delivering results. She has a passion for mentoring emerging leaders and building effective teams.
Ms. Perez holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Business Economics and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Communication from the University of California at Santa Barbara. For more than four years, she has served on the board of Dallas-based nonprofit, CitySquare, which focuses on fighting the causes and effects of poverty.
Connect with Kerry: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kerrycperez/
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Welcome to Elevate Care. I'm your host, Kerry Perez, and I'm joined here today with Dr. Danielle McCamey. We are really excited to talk about mentorship, leadership, diversity in nursing. Dr. McCamey, you're welcome to the show. Thank you for having me, Kerry. Awesome. So happy to have you. Before we get started, can you tell us a little bit more about you and your background? Yes, absolutely. So my name is Dr. Danielle McCamey. And I love this question because I'm like, how can I like
come up with a little bit of flair outside of just naming my entire resume. you know, I like to say my claim to fame is that I help build communities that create opportunities. And when I look back over the course of my career, that's exactly what I've done. But my current role, I get the opportunity to serve as the assistant dean for strategic partnerships at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing. And then I also serve as the founder, CEO, President of DNPs of Color.
which is an organization focused on increasing diversity in nursing specifically for nurses that have their doctor degree. And then my other hat is my nurse practitioner hat and I serve as an acute care nurse practitioner in a surgical ICU in DC. Wow. What an impressive resume and your hat closet sounds like it's huge. Very decorated, yes. Definitely. Dr. McKamey, know mentorship has meant so much for me,
Talk to me about what it has meant for you in your career. Absolutely. So mentorship is literally the key to success in any endeavor. And I always tell people that if you don't have a mentor, you need to stop what you're doing and find one today. And my recommendation is that you always have at least, it used to be three, now I've expanded it to four. So the first mentor you should have in your toolbox is someone that's
I call mine my mama mentor, but someone that has that parental type energy where they understand you from a human perspective. They know your joys, your pains, your flaws and your strengths. And they're able to speak to you in that either tough love or parental love type of energy that helps motivate you. The second mentor I always recommend is like your career strategist, someone that knows how to navigate the game of professional life, corporate world.
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and that understands your skillset and your strengths and to help you start to cultivate those strengths and utilize that as leverage to get to where you ultimately want to be. And the third mentor is, I always say like your hashtag goals mentor, someone that might not be as accessible in your network, but that you can watch just by the impact that they make in the world. And I think about, you know, just to be funny, not, but just to be fun like Beyonce or Oprah.
They might be celebrity in nature, you really value their impact. So you take notes on how they live their life and what they put their time and talents to. And then the fourth mentor, which I just recently added because of one of my mentors attending one of her lectures, Dr. Roberta Waite from Georgetown, is a historical mentor. And this is someone that has been a prominent figure in history.
or in the specific area that you're looking to pursue, but they've passed on. So for me, I think about bell hooks and I think about W.E.B. DuVoice, where you're still able to learn from them, even though they've passed on. So mentorship is definitely a key. You have to have at least one, but my recommendation is four. I love that. What a clear example of that.
people can go follow. I was just having a conversation yesterday with one of my former employees talking about mentorship and not only mentorship, but advocacy. You I like to kind of talk about personal board of directors, but I love the way that you frame that out. That gives just such great, you know, criteria. So was there an experience in your life that kind of started that journey on finding mentorship?
Yeah, when I think back when I was a baby nurse, I struggled with that transition from coming from undergrad to new to practice. And I didn't realize that it was called mentorship when I was going through my new nurse experience. And the first preceptor that they paired me up with, we just wasn't a good match. Our styles didn't connect and I was not thriving in my role. mean,
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I felt like I wasn't learning and I wasn't meeting the milestones that was being expected of me. So I got the strength to advocate for myself for another preceptor. And then they ended up giving me that second chance and pair me up with someone that not only was a preceptor, but was a mentor. And I feel like there's a definitive difference when someone's precepting and mentoring. The preceptor is a little bit more in the transactional type of energy.
and the mentor is a little bit more relational, what's some elements of transactional? So this individual, her name is Darlene Gardner. She's passed on, but I mean, her legacy lives on with everything that I do. But she was able to sit with me, learn about me as a human, and understand some of my life circumstances that I brought to my practice, and was able to speak that language that really resonated with me.
and helped me to find the confidence to step out there to learn. She created an environment that it was safe to make mistakes. And then she also gave me that balance of like nurturing and tough love. So she was very motivating and very strategic with how she crafted our experiences together. And it was that moment that, that, you know, definitive moment that I felt like was like my first mentoring experience. Excellent.
You touched on it, but why specifically do you find mentorship, diversity, mentorship so important in the clinical and nursing setting? my gosh. Mentorship, especially in nursing, is critically important. And mentorship for nurses of color is exponentially important. Because when you think about, and I'll speak to my experience, being a nurse of color, we already have
different ways that we've come to having access to nursing. And then you add on some of the lived experiences of racism and how to navigate that from whether you experience it from patients, colleagues. And so there's additional, I call it strategies that you have to be privy to, to navigate, to figure out ways to...
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essentially compartmentalize some of those experiences to move forward to not let it be so traumatic, but also use it as an opportunity to be resolute in your mission that you have in being of service through nursing and then also just understanding the structures of society and inequities that show up in practice.
and unfortunately we experienced, so the experience is completely different. So you need mentorship to help guide and give you those strategies on how to, be successful. And those strategies, they're, they're large, they're complex. Yeah. Is there kind of, an application example, or maybe kind of delve into one of those strategies in particular for our audience? You know, I guess a simple.
I guess the strategies that come to mind is just communicating when you are faced in some of these microaggression or flat out racist experiences from patients racializing you saying they don't want a black nurse to even colleagues just commenting just on just society events. so when I've been faced with that, some of the strategies are is just really trying to look at people for their humanity and
try to look at it from that lens and be focused on your professional commitments in caring for the person. And so in some instances, you just flat out have to advocate for yourself and ask for a different assignment. it can be something like that. That's the thing that comes top of mind. Thank you so much. And the other topic that we're addressing too is
in leadership in particular, and with your CEO status and founder status of DNPs of Color, talk to me a little bit more about that organization and the importance of mentorship there or even what the mission is all about in leadership in particular. Yeah, so DNPs of Color, I am just so fortunate that I get the honor and privilege to be of service through leadership of this organization.
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And it was created from my experience of being the only black woman in my doctoral nursing practice program and just wanting to have a community that understood the lived experience and how to strategize to be successful at the level that the doctoral education provides for you. It opens up so many doors. And so with DMPs of Color, our mission is to serve nurses of color.
through networking, mentorship and advocacy to increase diversity in doctoral studies, clinical practice and leadership. And I always- got that down. That's a good- I it's- Yeah, one more time. That's good. Yeah. It's in me. And so, you know, we were delivered in including the mission pillars of networking, mentorship and advocacy, because if anybody knows your network is directly aligned with your net worth, it's about who you know. And so really building up this-
this group of professionals because like I mentioned before, when you have your doctorate degree, it opens up so many different doors and gets you seats at different tables. So there's lots of power in that to be able to leverage with that network. And so the second mission pillar is mentorship. As we've been talking about, literally the key to success in any endeavor. And because we have a group of professionals that are high level and in different spaces from academia, clinical practice, policy, leadership,
It really gives us that unique advantage to be able to pour into this group of professionals. And then the last pillar is advocacy. We will be remiss being a group of professionals that have been historically marginalized or racialized to not have an advocacy component to really amplify the value that we provide and the significant contributions that we make to the profession. So we are nationwide. I always say nationwide. We have folks internationally now from Canada.
to Africa, to Haiti that are invested in the community and find value in what we offer and how a mission really resonates with their experiences. Excellent. Congratulations. And to go international, that's so huge. And I'm sure that impact has just felt far and wide. You know, I love those pillars. And you mentioned specifically mentorship and advocacy. And you know,
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The way that I have thought about advocacy before is a little bit different than how you just described it, but it makes a lot of sense. I'm also curious if you kind of can think of a mentor being an advocate as well. know, one thing I think is that, mentors, can be that person, that can be that sounding board, they can help to guide you, but to actually think of ways to advocate for you when you're in the room and even when you're not in the room.
You know, I don't know if there's a question there, but you know, if you have any sort of thoughts or response on that concept. Yeah, and I think that the energy with the mentorship in our group is creating opportunities. And so a large part of our mentors are of service in the mentoring capacity because they've had a lived experience either without one or they've had one that was excellent in shaping them into the profession that
professional that they are. So a lot of the mentors offer their resources, their time, their talents to help, I would say just toss their mentees name in the room of opportunity. So I love that energy within our group is that we all have come from some sort of experience where someone has either doubted us or helped us and we utilize as motivation to help the next person to.
not only arrived at the level that we are, but surpass us. And I think that's legacy building in action is being of service with your time, talents and resources, but also being mindful of passing the torch to the next generation to take it further, to make it stronger and to keep it going. Yeah, it can sound tripe, but that pay it forward mentality is so important and realizing, you know, a lot of people helping.
everyone get to where they are and how can you be that for other people? Some folks are like, how do I find a mentor? Obviously through the groups that you've created, there's a built-in networking, but as you're either getting started or mid-career or leadership, how do you advise people go and seek out those four different mentors that you outlined? Yes. I get this question a lot.
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I was speaking to a group of students at Hopkins around kind of creating relationships and expanding your network. And I guess one of the many things that came out of the pandemic is that it made approaching people so much more accessible because we're able to leverage our virtual social media and it's acceptable. I can remember pre-pandemic reaching out to someone on LinkedIn and they would be like, you're reaching out to me on LinkedIn, how dare you? But now we're connecting.
you know, hitting that connect button and sitting, sending private messages and setting up meetings. So, you know, I always encourage people to start with LinkedIn, look at people's profiles to see if there's any of their work or their experience that resonates with you and send a message and say, Hey, and be transparent. I'm in the market looking for a mentor. I looked at your profile and I looked up some of your work that resonates with where I want to be or some of my passions. Would you be interested in a quick conversation? And so.
That makes it easy to at least have a quick conversation to kind of gauge the energy to see if it's going to be something fruitful. And I always tell people, people that are in the business of mentoring will either accept you on or at least connect you with someone that might be more aligned or have more bandwidth to be able to mentor you. Great. I want to double click. no, I have to put a dollar in the
corporate jargon, you know, jar right there. But as far as being a mentee, what does it actually look like to be a good mentee? It's not just about kind of, hey, calling someone and then sitting expectantly for the mentor to do something. Absolutely. And I tell this to folks that that tap me to be their mentor. And I level set with them. say, OK.
These are the expectations I have for my mentee. And this is what I impart to those that want to be mentored. Make sure that you have at least one or two bullet points that you want to present to the mentor. And then the second piece of advice I always say to them, you have to lead the relationship because nine times out of 10, the mentor has a lot going on and you have to really set that cadence on meeting.
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and how you want to interact and being clear with the mentor, what skills or resources or energy or inspiration that they have that you're interested in also sharing with them so that they're clear on what you're looking for and that can help best guide the mentoring relationship. That's the foundation. And then from there, you cultivate the relationship so that you kind of gauge how you're going to move forward together in the mentoring capacity.
And then similarly for a mentor, I'm sure everybody would love to take on as many people as they can, but do you have any thoughts or advice for kind of striking that right balance of, you know, supporting and giving enough of your time away, but, know, maintaining your own balance with yourself? Yeah. So me being a seasoned mentor that have a lot of mentees for me, I go through my bandwidth checklist.
because I think at the end of the day, what's important for me being a mentor is that it is a mutually beneficial relationship and not transactional. The transactional relationships don't really feed my soul and it's just, not, you know, it's, I just don't like the transactional. So for me, I always, you know, take an internal check to see if this is a mentee that energetically I can take on fully and completely with what they're,
what they've come to me asking for. And then two, ensuring that I can show up as my best self for them in any capacity that's needed for their success. And so if I answer no to those, I'll say, you know, actually, and I'm honest, I'll say, you know, my bandwidth or I'll even say, I feel like the skill set or the compatibility from what we've discussed.
doesn't align, but I'm happy to introduce you to the following professionals, look up their profiles and see which one resonates and that can do a warm intro. That's kind and it really does show, you you are actively in support of their development, yeah, keeping things in balance. So thank you for that. I guess weaving back in a little bit into, you know, nursing specific and from a diversity perspective, how,
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through mentorship or through these relationships, are you helping to have others create a more inclusive environment? Or what guidance would you give or what advice would you give for people wanting to create an inclusive environment? Yeah, so creating an inclusive environment requires the time and attention of everyone. And so I'm
really big in aligning yourself with things that give you joy and that align with your personal mission and passion. So if you find that you may not identify as a person of color, but the mission and vision of an organization resonates with the things that you want to contribute your time and energy, get involved or find opportunities to connect, to learn more and be of service. You know, so it's it's it's about thinking from a lens of
imparting your knowledge because someone has imparted knowledge and time into you into the next generation. And then in terms of just fostering that diversity, equity and inclusion, just make being mindful of where you are as a person and just taking a check around to see if you're inviting different perspectives or involving yourself in different activities, acts of service that are different from
how you identify. So important. So Dr. McKamey, we've covered a decent amount of ground. What have we not maybe chatted about that you'd like to share with our listeners and viewers? You know, I think just to touch on some of the leadership pieces, you know, to really, I'm on a quest of like dismantling the structure around leadership because I really feel like people think that leadership is
a formal thing or sometimes doesn't apply to them. when I think about it from the frame of being a nurse, I always want to encourage nurses that you are a leader in every aspect of the word. And because of nursing, it allows you a superpower that gives you that foundational knowledge and connection to humanity and the ability to be able to advocate. And so I always want to encourage nurses out there that you're a leader.
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Your impact is felt and encourage people to take hold of that leadership energy and allow that to be aligned with your passions and missions and how you want to make an impact in your career nursing. What an empowering sound bite. That is so great. Thank you so much. If people want to learn more about you or DNPs of color, where can we find you?
We're on all the social medias. Like, if you just even Google DMPs of color, our website and everything comes up, but our social media handle is DMPs of color. I'm also available on all the social media. My handle is Dr. McKamey. Thank you so much, Dr. McKamey. You know, just
Personally, you have such a strength and warmth about you. I can tell why you are a magnetic person that people want to get mentorship from and that how you really are living what you say about sort of passing down the torch. So thank you so much for your time and thanks everybody for joining us on Elevate Care. We'll see you next time. Thank you for joining us today on Elevate Care. If you found this episode valuable, please consider sharing it with a colleague and subscribing to our show on your favorite podcast platform.
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