118: Power of the Podcast: This Is Getting Old
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See You Now is a podcast highlighting the innovative and human-centered solutions that nurses are coming up with to solve for today's most challenging healthcare problems. Created in collaboration with Johnson & Johnson and the American Nurses Association and hosted by nurse economist and health tech specialist, Shana Butler. ♪

We're making it an equal playing ground for everyone to elevate their care no matter where they are in the world. I want to be the person that answers their question and has no bias. You can feel the human connection from our conversation. Who knew? The power of the podcast.

By 2030, the boomers will finish turning 65. So that means we're going to have more Americans over the age of 65 than when we have under the age of 18 for the first time in human history. They will be about 23% of the U.S. population.

With the podcast, what I'm trying to do is help people get their bearings around aging, caring for an aging parent, being a caregiver to an older adult living with any type of chronic illness, that there's a place that they can go to get trustworthy, reliable, evidence-based

answers. People are going to the internet, they're turning to YouTube, and I want to be the person that they find that answers their question. And so that's really what the podcast is about, is that all of this stuff is not in place. And that is what was getting old. Welcome to See You Now. I'm Shawna Butler. Who doesn't love a great podcast? Obviously, See You Now listeners do.

And podcasts are doing a lot more than entertaining and keeping us company. They're educating us, inspiring us, keeping us up to date on new research, creating community, and filling some very significant gaps in our access to health experts and health education.

In the 2024 annual report from the Commonwealth Fund, researchers compared health systems performance in 10 peer countries, including the United States, to glean insights on where the U.S. needs to improve. The findings, while not unexpected, were nonetheless grim and troubling, and detail how Americans face greater barriers to accessing and affording health care than those in our peer nations.

Recognizing that podcasts appeal to everyone, nurses are taking their practice to the airwaves, producing and hosting podcasts that share their specialized expertise to reach people where they are and where they listen. And in doing so, are delighted by how their podcasts are effective in addressing the gaps in access to care, education, community, and professional education.

In the third of our three-part series, Power of the Podcast, we meet a geriatric nurse practitioner and podcaster from Wilmington, North Carolina, who is servicing all the things that need to be in place so everyone around the world can age well. Let's listen in.

I am Melissa Batchelor. I am a nurse and a nurse practitioner with nearly 30 years of experience caring for older adults and their families. And I'm also the host of a weekly podcast called This is Getting Old, Moving Towards an Age-Friendly World, where I talk about issues related to aging, age-friendly initiatives, and Alzheimer's disease. ♪

So Melissa, you've been spending a lot of time with older adults. When most people go into healthcare, the scope of your career, you know, kind of that career practice and trajectory, it's a really small group of people who think, you know, I think I want to take care of the oldest. So how is it that care of older adults was something that captured your heart and has really shaped your practice?

Yeah, well, we can be very clear that I did not go to nursing school to work with older adults, nor did I go to nursing school to work in a nursing home. In fact, I used to sit out on the front steps of the School of Nursing and say I didn't care where I worked, but I was never going to work with older adults and I was never going to work in a nursing home. And then about a month before graduation, my mom met an administrator of a local skilled nursing home who wanted to offer me a job because I was going to be a registered nurse and a baccalaureate prepared registered nurse at that.

So we saw that as like a big compliment, sight unseen, hire a new graduate into a leadership role. What I know now is that most nursing homes do not have even one baccalaureate prepared registered nurse. And the turnover rate is 60, 70% or higher in some of these facilities.

But I got into it and fell in love with the residents. And I was like, I don't necessarily like what I see here, but if I leave, I'm never going to have the opportunity to make it better.

And so that's why I decided to stay. And then I decided to become a family nurse practitioner because I was tired of calling my medical director at the time. And he never seemed to know the residents. And we had a new geriatrician come into town. I saw her go into residence rooms. I saw her examine residents. I could call her and she would know more about the person's medications than I did. And that had never happened to me before. And I said, I want to be a part of that model of care.

So I went back to graduate school, became a family nurse practitioner, and then worked for her for five years. So I used to tell people I became a registered nurse to improve care at the bedside, became a family nurse practitioner to improve care in my community. And I got my PhD to make care around the world better for older adults. Something that you said was while you were there providing care in the skilled nursing facilities, you saw things you didn't like.

What were those things that you saw that you weren't so happy about? Yeah, I think a lot of it had to do with the education and training and preparation of the staff. Our in-services tended to revolve around something regulatory and not necessarily about improving care. Dementia care information wasn't even in the nursing assistant curriculum when I went through that program, what, maybe mid, early 90s.

Most schools of nursing didn't have even one faculty member prepared in geriatrics and particularly not geropsychiatric nursing.

So there was a lot of development that the workforce needed. So when I was getting my PhD, I was like, I know three things. I know that I love to eat. I know I love to take care of older adults living with Alzheimer's disease and their families. And I love to teach. So I will bundle all of that up and make that my program of research. So now I have an intervention that I developed called NOSH, which stands for Nurses Optimizing Supportive Hand Feeding Program.

where I teach staff, family caregivers, the sensory changes that happen in dementia that impacts somebody's ability to feed themselves, as well as how to manage behaviors, and then teaching them three different hand feeding techniques that act as a sensory motor cue. When we tap into the sensory motor system, when we're losing the ability to use and understand language, there's a lot more likelihood that person's going to understand it's time to eat.

I don't know that people really know that connection between dementia and self-feeding. Can you say just a little bit more about that?

Yeah. So the ability to feed ourselves is the first thing that we master in childhood. And the way that we then develop skills is then you can dress yourself and you can, then you can walk and then you can use the toilet. And so children have these kinds of developmental milestones that they all have to meet. But as we age, there aren't like decremental milestones. Basically you grow up and once you're an adult,

Your lifestyle choices dictate how physically well you're going to be, how functional you're going to be. There are a lot of social elements that go into how well we age, but we don't have these decremental things

milestones that we all meet. You could have two 80 year olds and one could be bedridden and very advanced Alzheimer's disease. And the other 80 year old is out playing golf and driving their car. But the truth of the matter is only about 4% of Americans ever need skilled nursing home care. 95% of 80 year olds are living at home on their own. But with advanced Alzheimer's disease,

And actually that's how you recognize some of the signs and symptoms. People will have trouble with what are called their IADLs or instrumental activities of daily living, meaning money management, going to the grocery store, preparing meals. You'll see changes there way before the person can't dress themselves or feed themselves. With that particular disease, you may see those signs early, but the ability to feed yourself is the last thing that you lose.

And so this intervention is just to support people because supportive hand feeding is actually what's recommended over tube feeding. But when you don't know what to do, people don't do anything or they do what they see other people doing. And so NOSH is intended to give people the information and the tools that they need to successfully provide supportive hand feeding for a person until death occurs. Because to date, we don't have any survivors of Alzheimer's disease.

But you will either die with that disease or you'll die from it. And if you die from it, most more than likely you're going to need supportive hand feeding to make your life more comfortable.

You're just talking about aging and older adults and reaching those different milestones and how many people are 80. There's some really interesting trends. I mean, when we start looking across the globe, we're living longer for the most part, and we're having huge demographic shifts. And, you know, according to the World Health Organization, all countries are facing these major demographic shifts where we're going to have this much larger proportion of older adults in our populations than we have with younger adults.

And it creates a lot of challenges on our social systems, on our healthcare systems, specifically in the US. One of my favorite statistics from Health and Human Services is that every single day, there are about 10,000 people celebrating their 65th birthday, an age that we start classifying people as older adults. We're thinking about them getting into Medicare and some of the social services and benefits. And we also have this

pretty significant jump of people living to 100 and beyond. You know, these huge shifts. In addition to older adults, we have millions of people providing hundreds of millions of unpaid caregiving hours. There's so much of the work that you've been doing and specializing in older adults. When you talk about building an age-friendly world, how do you orient people to understand aging presents...

a lot of structural and practice and policy issues that we need to be thinking about. Well, just to go back on what you said, by 2030, the boomers will finish turning 65. So that means we're going to have more Americans over the age of 65 than when we have under the age of 18 for the first time in human history. They will be about 23% of the U.S. population. And in

Interestingly, we have more working adults that are providing care for an older adult than our parents of children under the age of five. So that also hasn't happened before. We have almost 23 million people providing care to older adults, and we only have about 21 million parents of young children. So that's happening today.

But when I say the term age-friendly and the way that I kind of bring people on board that I'm not just talking about older adults, because when things are age-friendly, they're friendly for everyone. But when you say the term age-friendly,

Most people think you're talking about older adults. They think that you're talking about the current older adults and that you're talking about baby boomers because historically they've been the largest generation. But about five years ago, the millennials took over as the largest generation. And three years ago, they started turning 40, which makes them old enough to sue for age discrimination in the workplace. So we've only got about 23 more years to get ready for

for the millennials, for the things that they're going to need when they turn 65, which are the same things that today's older adults need. So while we have a lot of older adults right now, there are a lot more on the way. So I typically tell people, if you were born before 1996, you need to listen up because you're

We only have 23 more years. And so it goes back to one of those situations where if you are looking at what your parents and your grandparents or even your great grandparents are going through and you don't like what you see as a young person, you need to develop a product, a service, a resource to make that part of the world better.

And if everybody is focused on that, it typically means we're focused on universal design. And when we design things to be friendly for all ages, all abilities, it's friendly for all of us. And the example I typically give is there were some beaches down in Florida and they wanted to make it easier for people to get out to the beach. So they laid down these mats and they pin them to the sand. And it was meant primarily to help people with wheelchairs and disabilities to access the beach because who loved it the most?

I was going to say moms with a bunch of little kids. Moms with the strollers, moms with the big wagons of sand toys and things. That was something.

That is a universal design that everybody benefits from it. And so if we're designing, you know, our businesses from an employer and employee perspective, from our products and services, if we're thinking about age friendly marketing, then everyone can see themselves. And so it's just better for the economy. It also reduces self-imposed ageist beliefs, which are rampant, particularly in the birthday card world.

And these things impact our health because if we have negative thoughts about aging, it actually impacts our health and can decrease our lifespan on average seven and a half years. It's a powerful statement. I mean, we hear about all the different isms. In an earlier conversation, you had said to me that ageism is the only thing

completely inclusive ism out there. When you said that, I was like, oh yeah, hadn't thought of that. Yeah. Most of the isms divide us. Aging is the only thing we are all doing together, but ageism is largely absent from the national conversation about aging. There's rampant ageism everywhere. Once you recognize it,

You see it and you hear it in the conversations that people are having. But that's really the point of the podcast and the point of all of my work is I want to change people's perception and thoughts about aging.

I wanted to pick up on something else that you had said, you know, when you were talking about why you got your nursing degree and then you got your nurse practitioner degree and then why you went into research and a lot of that. How did you say that, that you wanted to improve care across the world? To improve care at the bedside, to improve care in my community and people get their PhDs to change the world.

You're one person and there's a whole lot of need out there. The podcast may be like your best shot at that goal. So on that piece, you cover a full range of topics on aging and an age-friendly world, everything from navigating healthcare, understanding technology, evaluating policies, to the very practical matters of caregiving and managing dementia.

So let's listen to a clip from one of your episodes. In this one, you're providing tips for traveling with a loved one who has Alzheimer's.

If you'll be traveling with a person who has Alzheimer's disease or related dementia, I have five tips to share with you today to help make your trip as smooth as possible. Welcome to This is Getting Old, Moving Towards an Age-Friendly World. I'm your host, Dr. Melissa Batchelor, and I'm a nurse and a nurse practitioner who's been taking care of older adults and their families for the past 25 years. Now let's dive into these five tips for traveling with a person living with Alzheimer's disease. ♪

First, you may want to book your flight with the in-flight assistance program, just like you would an unaccompanied minor. This way you get help from the curb all the way through security and you have help getting that person onto the aircraft. Be sure that you book your flight to stay within your routines as much as possible. So if the person gets up late, you may want to consider a late morning or early afternoon flight and maybe not take the red eye, which it disrupts the

everybody's routine. Secondly, be sure that you stay together. When you're going through airport security, you want to be sure that you go through the security first because you can always come back over to help that person with Alzheimer's disease. But if they go through first, then they could end up stuck over there if you get hung up with security. Thirdly, be sure that you have a companion card with you.

This is a way to communicate to TSA when you're going through security as well as your flight attendants that you are traveling with a person who has a cognitive impairment. That way, if the person gets agitated or upset, at least they have had that warning ahead of time that they're not dealing with a person whose brain is functioning in a normal way. Fourthly, if you need to go to the bathroom,

That person needs to go to the bathroom while you're, or even if you need to go to the bathroom while you're in the airport, be sure to try to find the family restroom. That way you can either go in there together as a single stall or the person could go in by themselves. You give them some privacy, but you can stand right outside the door in case you need to help them in any way.

And fifthly, just be prepared for agitation and anxiety. Anytime any of us travel, we're disrupting our normal routine. So be sure you have things like snacks, fill up a water bottle once you get through security, have magazines or movies already downloaded on your iPad. But anything to help distract that person and keep them calm is going to be helpful. So I hope these tips have been helpful to you and I will see you next time.

This is Getting Old, Moving Towards an Age-Friendly World podcast. I love that. How did that come into being? So actually, when I was a doctoral student, I did a series of nine podcasts, what we called podcasts, for the Johnny Hartford Foundation and the American Association of Colleges of Nursing. They had developed this geriatric nursing education consortium because most schools of nursing didn't have even one faculty member with expertise in geriatrics.

But I was listening to the presenters and I was a brand new teacher. I was like, oh my gosh, these people are amazing. I wish I could bottle them up and take them home. And I was podcasting my own content and using technology to get students interested in geriatric nursing. The traditional program over three years was,

trained 818 faculty in all 50 states and in three countries. I took those nine modules and turned them into podcasts, and we only put them on the NYU website. But over the next five years, those were accessed over 60,000 times in over 40 countries. And I thought that many people are never going to read my peer-reviewed publications or see me present at a scientific conference. So

So then fast forward to 2020, that's when I started doing, this is getting old, moving towards an age-friendly world. But the reason it's called this is getting old is because we have known for 65 plus years that this many older adults were coming down the pipeline and we are still not ready. Our healthcare system is fragmented. And so recent commercial I did for the podcast was when you turn 50, you're like the youngest of the older adults.

So you're like in the freshman class. But unlike when you're a freshman in high school and college where you get an orientation, there is no orientation to turning 50.

or beyond. And so with the podcast, now what I've done is created a digital hub and it's called Age Wise U. So it's the University of Becoming Wise About Aging. And that is what I'm trying to do is to help people get their bearings, not only around aging in and of itself, but caring for an aging parent, being a caregiver to an older adult living with any type of chronic illness. There's a place to get trustworthy, reliable, evidence-based information

answers. And so that's really what the podcast is about is that all of this stuff is not in place. And that is what was getting old. So, so that's how I ended up using technology to reach a broader audience and to go where people are. People are going to the internet, they're turning to YouTube and I want to be the person that they find that

that answers their question and has no bias, but. No, they're coming to you for expert advice, for trusted advice, for evidence-based advice and for on demand and timely and broken down into, you know, what do I need to know at this moment on this very particular topic? And when I start looking at the range of topics that your episodes are covering, I'm

There's a lot. There's a lot. There's always something to talk about. And when you hit that stage of being an older adult, that paired with the other striking piece that you said of how many people are taking care of an older adult. That's a whole new universe of navigation and choices and decisions. So yeah, the range of topics that you're covering, why don't you describe them? Because it is pretty wide.

So they actually, they fall into three buckets, aging and Alzheimer's disease, and then age friendly initiatives. And then a lot of it is kind of listening to my audience. You know, my Alzheimer's content does get the most traction, but a lot of the aging topics do as well. A

A lot of this work is meant to help caregivers of someone living with a chronic illness, but also teaching them how to age well, because if you are a caregiver and you're not taking care of yourself, you can't take care of anybody else.

And as a younger person, you need to be thinking ahead. What type of older adult do I want to be? And so this is where some of those ageist beliefs, like really taking a look at those to say, you know, do I think aging equals disability and decline and decay? Or do I think aging means somebody being vibrant and energetic and embracing life? Actually, most of the people I know are aging well, but for some reason we get stuck on the negative piece and nobody's challenging our thinking anymore.

So it's the kind of things that I see in my world, how to pick a quality nursing home, how to pick quality home health care. I mean, you've got everything from improving your memory, thinking about nutrition, to dressing your age, warning signs of Alzheimer's, how to deal with forgetfulness, perimenopause. You've done a lot on medications in Alzheimer's. So there's a huge amount of...

care information that most people don't have access to. How do you view being somebody who's taking their nursing expertise and putting it in a podcast as a way to address lack of access and equity in care?

So one of the things that a lot of people may not realize that we have about a little over 5 million nurses and physicians in this country and less than 1% of us are board certified in geriatrics. And I think people underestimate and undervalue the expertise that providers trained in geriatrics have. And, you know, I think hospitals and health systems don't really

Value it either because it's not a money generating arm of the healthcare system, but it is a money savings and a improving quality of life arm. But that's why I started using technology to share things that I know that other people need to know.

because it does make a huge difference. One of my mom's friends would call me and say, I've got my mother down in Florida and all this stuff is happening and assisted living and like, what's going on? You know, so even explaining healthcare navigation, you know, we have a very broken fragmented system. How does all that play into the long-term care landscape? I mean, talk about being overwhelmed. You will be overwhelmed. So those are the things that

People with expertise in geriatrics can help other people navigate all of it. And it is a lot. You were a health and aging policy fellow and you got to serve in the United States Senate, you know, with the committee on aging. I was a 2018 health and aging policy fellow. I still serve as a mentor for that program and served in the United States Senate, the special committee for aging center, Susan Collins office out of Maine.

And I asked them if I could just be in charge of all things Alzheimer's. I got to help them with hearings, got to drop the geriatric workforce enhancement program or the GWEPs, which was the only federal legislation geared towards building our geriatric workforce. And we have about 52 GWEPs around the country, but I got to drop that legislation in the hopper and then got to write speeches for Senator Collins. And one of the

fun things to do was i was already very much into social media published a book on using social media and health care a guide to building your professional digital presence

And one of the examples is that the Bold Alzheimer's Act, and that stands for building our largest dementia infrastructure for Alzheimer's disease. The Alzheimer's Association and their policy arm luckily shortened that to hashtag Bold Alzheimer's Act. The Bold Alzheimer's Act was signed into law New Year's Eve of 2018.

And it engages our public health departments in raising awareness about brain health and Alzheimer's disease. And so this was based off some work the CDC had done. And so now you see commercials like DC has a brain health task force. I'm serving on that.

And so there was a huge social media push. So I do a lot of lectures now about how nurses can use social media to raise public awareness and to help these professional organizations and grassroots organizations to let people know about policies, explaining why they're important, how you can support them, visiting your legislators. I actually have three podcasts with a current nurse who's a staffer and Senator Bob Casey's office, who's now the chair of the Special Committee for Aging.

So building that network, knowing how to talk to policymakers, what the legislative process looks like, because the storytelling is

is the part that gets their attention. Tell them a story. And if you know of a solution, let them know. If not, just be very clear about what the problem is and what needs to change. And then there's a better chance that they can pick that up for you. But I loved having that experience. Policy is woven throughout everything that I do. I've been working now with six age-friendly municipalities. We do an annual event every year called the Age-Friendly Ecosystem Summit.

You can go to the GW Center for Aging and find that. They're usually in October, but it's Maryland, D.C., Virginia, and North Carolina. We added North Carolina this year. And it's just bringing people together to have these conversations about what does a national plan for aging look like? The Administration for Community Living just released a framework for that.

But I can remember 20 years ago, not having time to pay attention to policy. Policy and podcasts and storytelling, you know, you just had three very powerful words that all come together. And you definitely are a pioneer in using the technology to get the stories out, to change the policies, to change the practice. Going back to this lack of access, right?

and the shortage of expertise, I think it's really incumbent on nurses to take their expertise and put it in a format to reach more people and to reach people where they want to access their information. Right. And to do it in a way that's effective. I look at it through the lens of being a lifelong learner, which is one of the aspects of being an age-friendly community is that you have lifelong learning as a core tenant. You know, this is getting old.

When you marry that with the changes of technology and the changes in society, there is no shortage of topics and episodes that you will have. I think you have a very long future ahead of you. Which is good because it's interesting because it is highly niched.

But, but it's so broad at the same time. So I think that's been a surprising piece for me as well. And then helping people see that even though this, this next episode isn't about Alzheimer's, there's something that relates to it. Like when I recorded last week was around diet and longevity. And it's like, well,

our diet plays a huge role in all of these things. And then I included some information about the hand feeding techniques. It's just kind of helping people find the information when they need it, but being there so that when they realize they need it, it's already there. So on demand, ready to go.

easy to digest because of the technology that you're using. There's a degree of accessibility, you know, in terms of language and closed captioning. So I love the fact that it's a permission free off the shelf technology. You didn't have to request anybody's permission to do this.

You took your license and your expertise and you said, let's go. And people have been following along for several years. And I, like I said, I see your audience growing and growing and growing because we're just having more and more people, you know, their freshman class of being an older adult. You're really building out a great community. So let's talk a little bit more about your audience who's listening, the reach and who's showing up, the impact that your podcast is having on them.

Yes, I think the majority of my listeners are when you look at the YouTube analytics, they're over 65. They're predominantly female. It is a global audience, but it is primarily in the US, the UK and Canada. And I think that's probably because our health systems are pretty similar.

I have about 1400 people visiting my website every day. And then you have all the monthly downloads in the audio only platform. So it is a top 10% globally ranked podcast. And when I first started, I was like, well, I don't know if anybody's going to be interested in aging and Alzheimer's disease and age friendly stuff, but I think they should be. And I feel like it's something I should do. So I started with five YouTube subscribers. And then just this past month hit over 30,000.

So it's continuing to grow. The format for the podcast is primarily me. Just in the past month, I've started doing a collaboration with a care pair. I call the dynamic duo Dangle and Dot. And Dangle is a person living with mild cognitive impairment and Dot is her care partner. And so having them bring stories into the mix also is good other than just like a traditional interview format.

I record it in video so it can be found on YouTube. You can go to my website, melissabphd.com, and there it will take you to all the different links. So you can watch it in video on my website. Every video has a blog. There's also the audio only format to it. And then you can follow me on social media and you can actually get on my email list. And then when a new episode comes out, you get an email tells you what that's about.

And I've also recently started recording them live and inviting my HYSU members to join me so they can comment and ask questions of guests that I have on the show.

Are you finding our healthcare colleagues, who else is using this in the professional realm and in the education realm? Have you got any insights about how it's being used there? I know that several of the podcasts are being implemented into different schools of nursing. People will tell me, oh, I love this episode. I'm going to put it in my course.

I'm actually doing a webinar later this month for some colleagues over at UNC Wilmington. And I'm just going to send them a list of like health policy, legislative related topics to share with their students. So I think faculty are finding it. All the episodes are freely available on YouTube. And so there's no way for me to really track where they're being used. But I can give you an example about why using technology is important.

and how it does impact your reach. I had done an episode with four chief executive for the NICH program, which is Nurses Improving Care for Health Systems Elders. I featured three health systems. We did the interviews. They all left to actually go to the NICH annual conference the next day. I had to go with my daughter to a volleyball tournament in Indianapolis. And I remember getting off the plane

And I got a message from a colleague. She sent me a picture. She goes, I'm at this, the niche conference and someone's showing your hand feeding demonstration video. And I was like, what? And this was somebody who'd found the hand feeding video. They had implemented it in North Dakota.

And their health system had gone from placing 100 feeding tubes in people with advanced Alzheimer's the year before to zero just by showing a three-minute hand feeding demonstration video and offering supportive hand feeding over tube feeding to those families. And I was like, now that's super cool that my science beat me to the conference when I had just done an interview to explain to people what this health system was about.

Special thanks to geriatric nurse practitioner and host of the podcast, This is Getting Old, Moving Towards an Age-Friendly World, Melissa Batchelor. And to the nurse podcasters featured in our Power of the Podcast series, critical care nurse practitioner and host of the podcast, Walking Home from the ICU, Kaylee Dayton. And stroke nurse navigator and Stronger After Stroke podcast host, Rosa Hart.

We encourage you to listen and share each episode in this series and subscribe to their podcasts.

As Melissa, Kaylee and Rosa share, educating patients and families plays a pivotal role in empowering them to actively participate in decision-making, navigating and improving their health, their care and their recovery. And the data shows that informed people are more likely to actively participate in their healthcare decisions.

But access to health experts and education isn't always convenient, affordable, or understandable. The World Health Organization emphasizes this challenge under the label "Health Literacy."

recognizing that millions of people face reading, language, and comprehension challenges. And that's one massive reason why user-friendly podcasts have become a popular, permission-free technology that nurses and healthcare professionals are turning to to meet the growing need for on-demand, trustworthy, evidence-based, and even entertaining health education and information.

And podcasts have become a popular and effective part of nursing, medical, and health education.

A recent National Media Group survey found that 75% of healthcare professionals use their smartphones to listen to podcasts. In a study published by Academic Medicine, physicians reported that podcasts provided them broad exposure to core content, personalized learning, and fostered their sense of connection to their professional communities. Who knew the power of the podcast?

Increasingly, nurses are discovering that power. And by combining their expertise with their humor, warmth, and media skills, they're bridging the gaps in care, reaching patients and families directly, building communities of support, updating our workforce on evidence, practice, and policy, creating easily digestible education tools for colleagues to then share with their patients and students. And they are improving care.

all around the world. For See You Now, I'm Shawna Butler. Thanks for listening. Nurses are transforming healthcare through innovation, compassion, and leadership. And Johnson & Johnson is proud to continue its 125-year commitment to champion nurses through recognition, skill building, leadership development, and more. The American Nurses Association is dedicated to building a culture of innovation

Nurses improve the lives of patients and communities through innovative thinking, empathetic connection, scientific rigor, and sheer determination. ANA is proud to support and advocate for our nation's most valuable healthcare resource, our nurses. For more information on See You Now and to listen to any of the earlier episodes in our library, visit seeyounowpodcast.com.