The white nurse’s cap that Barbara Williams wore in the hospital in the late 1960s and early 1970s is on display in her office at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway, just one reminder of how times have changed in the profession.
In those days, nurses weren’t allowed to wear their hair past the collars on their uniforms.
“I had very long hair, to my waist, because it was the ’60s,” she said. “Getting that hair up underneath that hat — oh, I’d have a headache every day.”
In a small act of rebellion, one day she wore a long braid down her back instead of tucking her hair into her cap. A UCA faculty member who was at the Little Rock hospital with student nurses took them off the floor because “I wasn’t dressed properly,” Williams said, laughing.
Williams, 65, is still a registered nurse, but she transitioned to education and is chairwoman of the UCA Department of Nursing. In January, she will become chairwoman of the Conway Regional Health System Board of Directors, which she has served on since 2010.
“Nursing has a unique voice and unique viewpoint that need to be heard on boards,” she said. “I think with the changes in health care, nursing has such a unique opportunity. We’ve always been team-oriented. We work in a team and know the team is vital for our success. We have a holistic view — the patient came from a home and is going back to a home. There’s that broad-thinking mentality.”
Jim Lambert, president and CEO of Conway Regional Health System, talked about Williams’ new role as incoming chairwoman of the system’s board.
“We are looking forward to Barbara stepping into the role of chairman of our board for the next two years,” Lambert said. “She’s following in the footsteps of a long line of chairmen who have provided outstanding leadership during times of significant change in the health care industry.”
Williams grew up in Searcy with an older brother and younger sister. Her dad, T.R. Garner, was in the Navy, and her parents moved around during World War II. Afterward, they settled back in Searcy, where her father opened a hardware store and her mother was the bookkeeper.
“Searcy was a neat town to grow up in,” Williams said.
She called herself an “average” student. “I loved to read, especially in about fifth grade. Those neurons synced in, and I became an avid reader,” she said.
Williams said her late aunt, Thelda Lawrence of Conway, taught English and was a librarian in the Conway School District. She sent the young Williams a recommended reading list.
“When I look back at the books she had me read, they were very broad,” Williams said. They ranged from the work of Freud, whose name Williams said she didn’t know how to pronounce correctly until college, to old fiction.
Williams said she decided in junior high school to become a nurse.
“There were no nurses in the family; I was the first,” she said.
Part of the reason she chose nursing might have been because that’s what women did in the ’50s and ’60s, and part of it was desire, she said. Williams recalled reading about psychiatry in an encyclopedia, which intrigued her, but she decided that degree took too long.
Williams began attending Harding University in Searcy, where her parents had met, but the school didn’t have a nursing program, and she transferred to UCA. After graduating from UCA in 1971, her first job was at the former Baptist Central Hospital in downtown Little Rock. The responsibility was “sobering,” she said.
“I remember being awake at night, ‘Did I do this? Did I do that? Did I go back and check on that patient?’” she said. “I loved patient care; I still do. There’s so much satisfaction with that.”
After a year, she and her husband, Brad, moved to Denton, Texas, to work on their graduate degrees. She worked on a master’s degree at Texas Women’s University in Dallas and taught at a community college in Gainesville. There wasn’t a full-time job available at the hospital in Denton, she said, although she worked there part time.
Teaching was supposed to be temporary, but she stayed three years.
“I fell in love with it,” she said. “What I learned is I have a good nursing philosophy, and I gave good care. I was able to shape the philosophy and care of a number of students who would then go out and give good nursing care.
“I think it does take a heart for it and the mind. The heart alone without the mind gives very bad care.”
Nurses are there to be “a guide” and help patients be independent, she said. “There has to be some empathy, to understand it from the patient’s perspective. The listening, the touch, the care. Caring is just so central to nursing.”
Williams and her husband moved to Helena for a year in the late ’70s, and she had finished all but her dissertation to earn a doctorate of higher education/psychology. She taught at a community college there, one that is now part of the University of Arkansas system.
“That was a fabulous experience,” she said. “I had never really experienced the Delta.” Some of the residents’ beliefs about health care were based in superstition, she said, recalling that one man came in with a pouch hanging from a leather string around his neck. She started to take it off, and he and others told her not to. “It was herbs, I’m sure. That was something that was very essential for his health.”
Her husband, a psychologist, got a job in Little Rock, and she was hired in 1978 as an instructor at UCA. She worked her way up to chairwoman of the nursing department in 1990. While at UCA, she completed her doctorate from North Texas State University, now the University of North Texas.
Williams said the changes in the UCA program have been “phenomenal,” from the dearth of nursing students in the ’80s when hospitals fired their experienced nurses to save money and people were scared away from the profession — the program had only 13 graduates one year — to the addition of a doctorate of nursing practice at UCA. The degree’s first class will graduate in May 2016. The UCA nursing program has several degree options for the baccalaureate degree, which has about 225 students in the program, as well as 163 graduate students.
The newest role in nursing, Williams said, is that of clinical nurse leader.
“They don’t do as much hands on,” she said. “They do a lot of bridging between team members. Their primary role is facilitating the care experience of the patient.”
The American health care system “is broken in many ways,” she said. For one thing, it doesn’t focus on prevention. A good health care system can bridge the gap, she said.
Williams said serving on the Conway Regional Health System board has broadened her knowledge of health care.
“I’ve learned more about health care seeing it from the health system’s perspective and all they have to manage, all the changes coming down from government … coordinating with the payers — the health insurance companies — and coordinating with physicians,” she said.
One of her goals as president, she said, will be to help implement a possible affiliation between St. Vincent Health System of Little Rock and Conway Regional.
“I’m very positive on that — I think it’s an excellent model,” she said. “St. Vincent is not going to purchase; it’s not a buyout,” she said, but it will provide “behind-the-scenes” strengthening. “Conway Regional will remain the community hospital, the health care system in Conway. It’s going to be mutual — they’re looking at us for assistance on how to learn to do some things, and we’re looking to them, so it’s mutual. It’s benefiting both sides.”
Williams was president of the Arkansas Association of Hospital Trustees. As a result of being president, she was on the board of the Arkansas Hospital Association. Simultaneously, she was appointed to a regional policy board of the American Hospital Association. “It’s truly grassroots up,” she said of the American Hospital Association.
In October, Williams received the 2014 Arkansas Hospital Association Chairman’s Award during the association’s annual awards dinner at the Little Rock Marriott. She said Doug Weeks, executive vice president for Baptist Health, is chairman of the association’s board and selected her to receive the award.
Williams said she didn’t know it at the time, but the honor isn’t automatically given each year.
“I don’t have a long list of awards, but it’s a very meaningful award,” she said.
More meaningful to her, though, is the difference she has made in the lives of people through her career.
Williams said that when she was a young nurse in her first job, she was asked to take the vital signs of a man who was getting ready to have surgery on his ear. At that time, the protocol was for a patient to have one arm tied to the bed after surgery to keep him from rolling over on the affected ear.
She asked the man if he was aware that was the procedure, and he wasn’t. A couple of days later, when the man was ready to check out of the hospital, he brought her a Styrofoam snowman. He said his daughter had brought it to him, and although he believed it was an inadequate gift for Williams, he wanted her to have it as a thank you.
“He said, ‘If I had awakened with my arm tied, and I had been alone in the room, I would have been panicking,’” she said. “I still have that little snowman. I think it’s illustrative of what a nurse can do — not just the task, but looking at the whole patient.”
Some things haven’t, and shouldn’t, change, she said.
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.