Van Brunt named Chief Nursing Officer

WORLAND – Banner Health Washakie Medical Center announced that Lisa Van Brunt, who has 20 years nursing experience, 15 at the facility, as their new CNO (Chief Nursing Officer).

“I am really excited and very honored that I get to be the CNO for our hospital,” Van Brunt stated.

“My goals as CNO are that we continue to deliver quality care with compassion, kindness and that we have the expert staff in all of our areas and support them in being able to deliver that quality given care every single day while always being competent and kind. Our focus is on the customer experience and part of our role there is to not only deliver care that is expert but you have to genuinely care, be passionate about what you are doing. The way that we do that is; my goal is to support that staff in however that looks likes in ongoing education and training and giving them the opportunity to continue to grow and develop and to keep those type of people at our facility,” she added.

Banner Health Washakie Medical Center CEO Jay Stallings stated, “Lisa has been here for roughly 15 years and has shown herself to be an extraordinary talent, she’s very, very well organized. She is compassionate; she controls her emotions so that people trust her. In my observation over all these years, she really truly seeks to understand before she makes a judgement on anything. Part of getting to the CNO position, there is a requirement with Banner that you have to have a post doctorate degree, usually a master’s degree in nursing and that is really a tough level to reach because, in nursing school they don’t really give you a lot of latitude for failure, there is not a lot of gray fuzzy area because we all depend on nursing to do absolutely the right thing and not make mistakes. So being able to get through the class work and the expectations and getting the highest grades possible, that’s a very, very tough component in receiving your master’s degree in nursing. It is a very difficult program. I think a lot of people can do it but, the rigor that it takes, I think sometimes discourages.”

Van Brunt worked hard to get to where she is today. “I got my associate degree from Casper College that was in 1999. I completed my bachelor degree from the University of Texas in 2015 and then my masters, recently completed with Grand Canyon University in June of this year,” Van Brunt said.

She added, “Just like any place that you work you continue throughout all of your career preparing yourself for next steps or different areas of expertise, because the important part of any place of employment is to be able to continue to grow and learn new skills and build new knowledge. That was one of the things that we had hoped for here in my entire career with nursing was continue to improve and grow up on my leadership.”

Van Brunt went on to explain what the CNO does:

“It is a big umbrella, the primary role of the CNO is to make sure that our clinical practice is being delivered based upon the standards of care that involves numerous resources not only from within, research that drives evidence based care, our policies, procedures, regulatory agencies, CMS guidelines, everything that governs health care in general, the CNO from a clinical perspective is responsible as the direct oversight to make sure that we have all those pieces of the puzzle and the right people in places that have the education and training and competence and skill to deliver that evidence based health care.

“Another thing that the CNO does is continue to be that person that looks for ways to grow our business and make sure that the needs of the community is being met on the different service lines that we have. Access to healthcare especially in the rural areas can be somewhat limiting, so we are always looking for ways: How can we make that easier? What services do we have? Are they fulfilling the needs of our community and our population? Or are there other areas that we consider that we can bring here to make that access easier. A great example is our growing oncology line on serving the needs in that area along with the other multitude of services we already have in place.”

Van Brunt replaced Le Gay Naseath who was asked by Banner Health to act as the interim CNO for a Banner Health facility in Nevada and decided to stay there as their permanent CNO.