Barry named 7 South Nurse Director

Mary Anne Barry, MBA, BSN, RN, has been named Nurse Director on 7 South, a role in which she has been serving as interim since June of 2017.

Barry has worked at BWFH since 2007 when she started as a PCA in her last year of nursing school. “I’m a career change. I became a nurse when I was 40,” she says. “My first career just wasn’t fulfilling.”

A chance encounter with a nurse in training who treated her son in the hospital inspired Barry to go back to school. “She was around my age and I thought, if she can go back to school, so can I.”

Since then, Barry hasn’t looked back. After becoming a registered nurse, she worked as a medical-surgical nurse and spent time as a float nurse before becoming a Clinical Leader on the 7th floor.

Barry was excited for the opportunity to take on the role of Interim Nurse Director over the summer and faced many challenges right away. “I felt like I was jumping into the deep end,” she says. “I had the perfect storm summer — the Joint Commission and so many of our nurses retiring and our Operations Coordinator was on maternity leave!”

With those challenges successfully behind her, Barry and her staff are focused on their ongoing process improvement projects which include work around early discharges of total joint replacement patients and face-to-face hand-offs with the PACU.

Barry has the help of her motivated staff to make it all happen. “A lot of our staff nurses right now have under five years of nursing experience, but they are really doing great,” she says. “They are eager for new experiences.”