https://www.infirmiere-canadienne.com/blogs/ic-contenu/2024/10/07/moira-macarthur-infirmiere-gestionnaire-mba
Moira MacArthur brings direct-care background to leadership position
By Laura Eggertson
October 7, 2024
Courtesy of Moira MacArthur / istockphoto.com/simonkr
Moira MacArthur’s previous roles ensure she values her staff, and she works hard to make sure unit morale stays strong. She knows the nurses are the critical players in the health-care system, not the administrators. “The nurses working on the floors, physios, occupational therapists, social workers, the continuing care assistants, the pharmacists — they are the backbone,” she says.
When registered nurse Moira MacArthur decided to enter the MBA program at Halifax’s Dalhousie University, she didn’t have a plan. She just knew she wanted to have more of a business role in health care.
It was 2022, six years after MacArthur had graduated from St. Francis Xavier University with her B.Sc. in nursing, and two years into the COVID-19 pandemic that threatened to overwhelm the health-care system in Canada and around the world.
For six years after graduating, she’d been working as a nurse on an orthopedic trauma floor at the Halifax Infirmary, and then as a nurse at an opthamology operating room at the Victoria General hospital in Halifax. Then, during the pandemic, administrators deployed her and many of her colleagues for stints to a COVID-19 testing unit and later, to an ICU.
As she watched health-care workers around the world struggle to get personal protective equipment, and risk their lives in pre-vaccine days, MacArthur began to wonder how leaders made public health decisions.
“I thought, ‘who’s making all these decisions? Maybe business is something I want to look into and pair with my health-care background’,” she says.
Combining her nursing experience with an MBA could give her the knowledge and qualifications to pursue a leadership role, she thought, allowing her to keep direct-care health practitioners at the centre of public policy.
Drawn to business
The idea of a business career had long attracted MacArthur. But she opted to pursue nursing, in part inspired by her grandparents and the nurses in Cape Breton who cared for a beloved aunt, who had spina bifida and later developed Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS.
“I saw the great rapport between VON nurses and my Aunt Peggy,” MacArthur says. “Their care truly made an amazing difference in her life and this inspired me at a young age.” Her parents also influenced her decision. They viewed nursing as an important profession, with excellent job security.
Although MacArthur loved being a nurse in the busy ophthalmology OR, she wanted to become the kind of nurse leader who impressed her during the pandemic by being able to adapt and think on their feet.
She chose business school while continuing to work part-time in the operating room at the Victoria General.
“It didn’t feel like work. I loved going there,” she says.
Earning her MBA involved two years of classes and an eight-month corporate residency placement. She served that placement at the Nova Scotia Health Innovation Hub — a provincial government centre for excellence intended to drive innovation and improvements through strategic partnerships.
That proved the perfect placement to display the ways MacArthur’s nursing experience could benefit and even influence the business decisions government leaders were making.
One of MacArthur’s first projects was researching and recommending a type of wearable technology to monitor people’s vital signs, alerting nurses by setting off an alarm if someone’s condition worsened while they waited in an emergency department.
“I was able to use my clinical judgment to get that initiative up and running without having to bounce a lot of questions off others,” MacArthur says. “It would be much more difficult to run and initiate a project like that if you did not have clinical experience.”
Thanks to MacArthur’s knowledge of what type of wearable alarm system would work best given an emergency department’s layout, and what vital signs it should measure, Nova Scotia has begun piloting the devices in a hospital in Dartmouth, N.S.
Another project involved introducing surgical robotics to Nova Scotia operating rooms, a strategy where MacArthur’s surgical experience in the operating room was particularly valuable, because she knew how these changes might affect staff.
“I felt like I brought a lot to the table,” she says.
Because of her experience at the Health Innovation Hub, MacArthur secured a job as a health services manager before she graduated with her MBA this past spring.
Manages orthopedic trauma unit
Now, she manages the first unit where she ever worked as a nurse: the orthopedic trauma unit at the Halifax Infirmary, a busy, high-acuity unit that treats people injured in accidents, often with life-altering results.
Her new role involves troubleshooting and “putting out fires,” she says. The crises she manages can involve budgets, human resources, patient care — or all of those issues at once.
“It’s very challenging,” MacArthur says. “Staffing is huge — hiring, retaining. If a piece of equipment breaks and it’s $50,000 to replace — that [problem] comes to me. If there’s an issue between a patient and family members on the unit — that comes to me.”
Any problem that could arise in a hospital does, and ultimately has ripple effects that land on her desk, requiring her to use all of her resources to cope with them.
When a day has been particularly challenging, MacArthur enjoys coming home to her husband Kyle Bouchie, a mechanical engineer whom she married this past summer. She also golfs, runs, and socializes with friends and family.
But as stressful as her new role can sometimes be, it’s nowhere near as complex as it is to be a nurse on the floor, she says.
“It is really helpful for me that I worked in this unit for three years, because I get it. I understand how hard it is,” MacArthur adds.
Her previous roles ensure she values her staff, and works hard to make sure unit morale stays strong. She knows the nurses are the critical players in the health-care system, not the administrators, she says.
Administrators are “there to make sure every issue gets dealt with in the proper way and to support staff in any way they can,” MacArthur adds. “The nurses working on the floors, physios, occupational therapists, social workers, the continuing care assistants, the pharmacists — they are the backbone.”
MacArthur is not sure where her MBA will take her, although she plans to stay active in health care.
“I can’t see myself ever giving up my (nursing) licence,” she says.
The health-care system can only benefit from people with clinical experience in leadership roles, she says, whether it’s to help design and set up a long-awaited hospital in Halifax, or to assess the impact of innovative technology on day-to-day patient care.
“We need more nurses with present-day experience around the table, pharmacists around the table, physiotherapists around the table,” she says. “We need their input. I will always be a big advocate of that.”
And whenever administrators, policy-makers, or politicians are contemplating a decision that affects the health-care system, MacArthur wants them to go back to the people who can really tell them what they need to solve their current problems: the nurses.
“I’m pro-nurse all the way.”
Laura Eggertson is a freelance journalist based in Wolfville, N.S.
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