At ThriveAP we are honored to have an expansive faculty of expert speakers and APPs with impressive credentials and experience. Today we are talking with one of our esteemed faculty members to gain their advice for thriving in an advanced practice career.
Jibran Majeed, DNP, ACNP-BC, CCRN, joined us to discuss his passion for patient centric care, leadership and the value of continuing education. Watch the interview below with Sarah Maxwell, Director of Marketing at ThriveAP and Dr. Majeed, or read the transcript below.
Interview Transcript
Sarah Maxwell: Hello, my name is Sarah Maxwell, Director of Marketing at ThriveAP. At ThriveAP, we are honored to have an expansive faculty of expert speakers and APPs with impressive credentials and experience. Today, we are talking to one of our esteemed faculty members to gain their advice for thriving in an advanced practice career.
Please join me in welcoming Jibran Majeed. Hi Jibran, how are you today?
Jibran Majeed, DNP, ACNP-BC, CCRN: Well, how are you? Thank you for having me.
SM: Oh my gosh, we're so excited to have you here.
JM: I'm excited as well.
SM: Well, tell us a little bit about yourself and your background. You know, who you are, where you live, your practice.
JM: I live in New York. I grew up in Brooklyn. I live in Westchester now. That's another part of New York. it's a little bit north of the city. I've been a nurse practitioner for a long time. I started my career as a nurse, in Beth Israel many years ago, in 2004 actually, where I was working in the role of a nurse in the cardiothoracic, uh, step down unit and then the coronary care unit for about Two, three years, then I became a nurse practitioner, and I've been working in Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center since 2009.
I started as an acute care NP, and for most of my NP life, I was working as a critical care provider. And then I was overseeing the rapid response team in the hospital in the role of a clinical program manager for the rapid response team. And then in 2019, I shifted gears into our regional urgent care centers.
The thought was as the institution was expanding and we have different ambulatory sites. In New Jersey, Long Island, these were billed so the patients don't have to come all the way to the main hospital if they're acutely ill. They can come to our urgent care center. So I oversee the team of advanced practice providers, that, manage the patients in those regional urgent care centers or the symptom care clinics is another name for it.
SM: Oh, wow, easy stuff, not a big load of work or anything. With all of that on your plate, what drove you to look into speaking to ThriveAP and what attracted you to the opportunity?
JM: I think, for me, I love learning and I love teaching and I think the best way to learn something is to teach it. That was one of the main, points that attracted me to be part of this. And, It has a great reputation. I also learned more about it, and I saw that ThriveAP has a lot of great courses to offer with a lot of advanced practice providers who are experts in their field, and I thought it was pretty cool, and I was knew I wanted to be part of this.
"And I think what we also bring is, not just the expertise/the knowledge, but the passion to really give patient centric care. So I think that really ties into the great work, that we're doing. And I think that when we are engaging in channels like ThriveAP, where we're connecting with other APPs, learning from other APPs, and I think that's an opportunity to build more momentum and do even greater, better and greater things as APPs." - Jibran Majeed, DNP, ACNP-BC, CCRN
SM: The APP community is definitely very passionate, and, I feel, a very giving community. Every time I talk to an NP or PA. Regardless of the amount of credentials they have, it's always how can we share that knowledge? How can we learn from one another? And it's a very, very passionate community.
JM: Agreed. Love that.
SM: Speaking of passion, what would you say is your greatest passion within your career?
JM: I think I have a few. I love what we do. I love patient care. I also, love leading a team - leadership and what leadership is about and how to be an effective leader.
It's learning every day. Some of my passion in the work that I do or have done is improving medical emergency response for patients that have acute deterioration. You know, responding to patients that have cardiac arrest or responding to patients that have other serious conditions for which a rapid response or a medical emergency response will be called.
And in my career at Sloan Kettering, I've been privileged to be the clinical program manager and also be part of multiple collaborative teams where we work with multiple stakeholders to improve the medical emergency response within MSK, the main hospital, but also the ambulatory sites, which means, training the APPs that were leading the medical emergency response with the skill sets to be able to deliver care for patients who are in cardiac arrest.
You know, standardizing the medical equipment, and learning other tools or obtaining the learning to have other tools to be able to deliver that type of care. In our urgent care clinics, it is also one of my passions where we have evolved so much in the last few years from what we were to what we are now, and what we're hoping to become. Where we have patients that are coming in with acute or urgent symptoms that need to be seen and we have really evolved in terms of taking care of those patients with things that would be done in an urgent care setting, but in an oncological urgent care setting. With that being said, you're, you're doing things, you're taking care of patients with all types of symptoms, the regular cold, flu, but then you also have patients that have complications from their cancer or have complications as a result of their cancer and are coming into us with bowel obstructions. We're learning how to do paracentesis. There's a lot of new initiatives that we're taking on which is really cool because it's giving us the ability to really practice on the top of our license and expand our skill set.
So passion, medical emergency response, patient care, leadership, and also engaging with people. I think we're in the business of human beings. And it's all about building relationships with each other and our patients.
"I think we're in the business of human beings. And it's all about building relationships with each other and our patients." - Jibran Majeed, DNP, ACNP-BC, CCRN
SM: That's such a key part of what you said before, too. That patient centered, patient centric care. It's still a relationship. They're people, so you do have to build that rapport.
JM: Yes, for sure.
SM: Yeah, that's a great point. So, with all of that crazy list of all the things you've accomplished, is there one, maybe, career accomplishment that you would pinpoint and say, man, that's the thing If I had to I'm the most proud of, or maybe a few that make you feel really proud?
JM: Yeah, one of, the accomplishments that I really felt proud of, or some of them: A list would be standardizing and improving the medical emergency response for the ambulatory site. So at Sloan Kettering, we have multiple ambulatory sites, almost up to 10, where each of the teams functioned very differently. The equipment was different. And I took the charge, with a group of passionate folks, to standardize the response. We identify, we build a response team where a clear leader was identified. A clear team who would respond to those events would be identified. But one of the things I'm also proud of is that with our work, we also got to study those patients, study the medical emergency response, and then write, write about it in the Journal of Oncology, and this was something we published. So it was one of the first publications looking at medical response in an ambulatory site in an oncologic setting. It was a very novel write up, which I was very proud I was part of that. Other things, building an adult anticoagulation tool, an algorithmic tool that you can use for treating patients with DVTs or PEs, and it sort of brings you down a pathway of which drug to choose. That was also part of my doctorate work at Sloan Kettering and then obtaining my terminal degree, obtaining my doctorate at Duke University years ago. That was another accomplishment that I was personally very proud of.
SM: Those are amazing. Those are definitely some accomplishments that you should be proud of. That's incredible. So when you're talking about you being published, what journals or apps or resources do you use so that you can stay on top of the latest trends with medicine and health care with it changing and evolving so rapidly? What do you use to make sure that you're staying abreast?
JM: That's a great question, I think there's a lot of different opportunities to obtain that learning education and it also really depends on your line of work, your area of expertise. Some of the journals that I like are a New England Journal of Medicine, which is broad and for everyone. If you're into critical care, there are also journals that are very specific for emergency medicine and for the kind of work that we do at Sloan Kettering, which is a freestanding cancer center.
There's also JADPRO, which is a journal that's really built and run by advanced practice providers who are experts in oncology. Other ways to also stay abreast are, even social media. I have a Twitter account where you can join different, groups; whether it's urgent care, emergency medicine, there a lot of experts.
Again, we're very multi disciplinary. Advanced Practice Providers, nurses, everybody is sharing knowledge with each other. I think there's opportunity to utilize and leverage the APPs that we have available in a way to learn and sometimes, learning can just happen from going to your app and reading a blog or reading some of the comments from other experts versus reading a full publication, because we all know that time is so scarce, and we don't always have it. But you can learn on the fly as you are engaging in social media, and in a way to learn.
"Again, we're very multi disciplinary. Advanced Practice Providers, nurses, everybody is sharing knowledge with each other. I think there's opportunity to utilize and leverage the APPs that we have available in a way to learn and sometimes, learning can just happen from going to your app and reading a blog or reading some of the comments from other experts versus reading a full publication, because we all know that time is so scarce, and we don't always have it." - Jibran Majeed, DNP, ACNP-BC, CCRN
SM: Oh, yeah. I'm definitely a fan of the quick digestible bites of, Hey, here's, what's going on and you can dive deeper if you want to. I can do this kind of quickly and get back to what I'm doing, but make sure I'm staying on top of things.
JM: Right, exactly.
SM: Well, switching courses just a little, thinking through what we do here at ThriveAP, which is, obviously supporting our NPs and PAs as they transition to practice. Part of that, that I think is so crucial, during that time is for them to have a really good mentor. Having somebody that they can trust and they can leverage as a resource to help build their confidence and further their career. What do you think are some key attributes of a good mentor?
JM: I love that question because I really believe in the importance of finding a mentor. Whether it's somebody that you work with or it doesn't have to be somebody you work with. But I think it's so important for an individual to find a mentor that they can connect with and I think part of what will make that relationship successful is respect. The mentor should also have the ability to listen, not just share their wisdom. A good mentor is somebody who's going to listen to the mentee, who's going to guide the mentee, but not always give the answers, but facilitate the mentorship in a way that you're showing them the path ultimately is for the individual to make the decision on what they feel is the best.
So the mentor is really there as a guide, not somebody that you call and they give you the answers, but really somebody who's going to take the time to listen to you, listen to your perspective, and also then also offer advice. As an APP, you want a mentor who you vibe well with, somebody that, you look up to, you value their opinion, but somebody also that respects you as an individual and has your best interest for you to grow in your career. And I think there's a mentor for everybody and some folks are lucky to have more than one mentor in their lives. But, I think it's such an important thing to have for everybody, somebody that you can look up to, that you can bounce ideas off and connect with.
I think some of the other attributes of a great mentor, somebody who's honest, somebody who has integrity, because he or she may be able to tell you things that you may not want to hear, but they're very important that they know they have your best interest, that's why they have to tell you the information that you may not, at that point, want to hear but you realize that's the best thing for you to hear, to get that kind of feedback.
That person should be able to give you that feedback, and you should be able to have that conversation with them where you are getting that feedback. So, somebody who's a good listener, somebody who's honest, somebody who has integrity, I think are some of the key aspects of a good mentor.
"Somebody who's a good listener, somebody who's honest, somebody who has integrity, I think are some of the key aspects of a good mentor." - Jibran Majeed, DNP, ACNP-BC, CCRN
SM: I couldn't agree more. I think that direct but kind honesty is often what we need. Just give it to me straight, right?
JM: Yes, yes.at least that's the way that I like getting feedback.
SM: Same. That transparency but in an ethical and kind way is, that's how you're going to grow.
JM: That's how you're going to grow. And I also think it's easier when people build that relationship because then they realize, Okay, I don't like what, I don't like what I'm hearing, because I'm feeling a certain way about it, but I understand that this is being given to me because it's the best advice for me.
SM: Absolutely.
JM: And just like that in patient care, you may get advice on how to do things differently for next time and again, that feedback is also very important from your mentors or your senior APPs or your physicians. You know, because life is about learning and sometimes we may learn new things or learn a different way of doing things or may not be perfect or may make a mistake and that's okay. I think it's all about learning from those mistakes and being open to that feedback.
SM: Absolutely. So, what advice then would you give to APPs today as they prepare for tomorrow and what that future success could look like for them?
JM: Never stop learning. Never stop listening. You do have a voice. I think the key to success is being respectful and also being open to learning. I think if you go in with that mindset that I'm ready to learn, you always are going to learn and grow.
"Never stop learning. Never stop listening. You do have a voice." - Jibran Majeed, DNP, ACNP-BC, CCRN
SM: I think that's great advice. There's no part of your career at any stage where there can't be some additional learning that goes on, right? Like you said, never stop learning. It's, it's ongoing.
JM: I think you never stop learning. Especially in healthcare, because there's always new things to learn. And then evidence shifts. Things that we're doing today may be different tomorrow based on new evidence. And then there may be new evidence that actually what we were actually doing 10 years ago was actually more effective because of this study. You have to learn to learn.
SM: I love it. Well, that's all the questions I have for you today because I obviously want to respect your time. I know it's very valuable. So I just want to thank you so much for joining us.
JM: Thank you, Sarah. Thank you for having me. And thank you for this opportunity.
Dr. Majeed has been at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center since 2009 working as a Nurse Practitioner. For most of his career as an NP, he practiced as a critical care provider in the ICU. Jibran oversaw the rapid response team in the role of a Clinical Program Manager of Rapid Response team. In 2019, he shifted gears and took on the role of overseeing APPs in the ambulatory Symptom Care clinics, which is an extension of the hospital’s Urgent care center
We are truly honored to have faculty of Jibran's caliber in our unmatched expert network. If you're interested in learning directly from experts, like Jibran, apply for the ThriveAP program today!