The Business of Healthcare Podcast · Center for Healthcare Leadership and Management

Transforming the Nursing Profession

·39 min·2 clips

Rebecca argues that every extra patient above a safe nurse load raises 30-day mortality by 7%.

1. The Business of Healthcare Podcast episode “Transforming the Nursing Profession” centers on Rebecca Love’s argument that nursing has been treated as a hidden cost rather than a paid service. 2. Host Dr. Bob Kaiser, Director of the Master’s Program in Healthcare Leadership and Management at UT Dallas, interviews Rebecca Love, who is a nurse, innovator, author, speaker, LinkedIn Top Voice, and TED Talk speaker. 3. The episode asks how nursing can gain equal footing in healthcare by changing reimbursement, leadership pathways, and innovation access. 4. Rebecca says she did not plan to become a nurse and had been headed toward law school after studying international relations and working on a presidential campaign. 5. She says her mother, who entered nursing school late in life, told her at dinner that the family would not support law school and believed she needed to become a nurse. 6. Rebecca says she applied to one nursing school, was told there was a two-year waitlist, and then received an acceptance letter about three weeks later. 7. Her early career turning point came in 2013 at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston, where she was teaching and working as a hospice nurse practitioner. 8. She describes leaving a hospice visit for a patient who wanted to die at home but could not find a nurse, then meeting graduates who still could not find jobs three months after graduation. 9. That mismatch led her to start HireNurses.com, a job board that aimed to connect nurses with jobs they actually wanted. 10. Rebecca says she used her mother’s nursing retirement money to launch the company after her father declined to fund it. 11. She argues that nursing education and language often fail to translate bedside problems into business terms that CEOs, CFOs, and COOs respond to. 12. At a Boston hackathon, she says she was surrounded by physicians and hospital leaders, realized those people were the decision makers, and challenged a proposed solution because it would only add work for nurses. 13. She says the room laughed when she asked whether anyone had asked the nurses, which showed her that front-line insight was missing from innovation conversations. 14. Rebecca says she later called 167 nursing schools before Dr. Hanrahan at Northeastern invited her to run a hackathon and build an innovation program. 15. She says the 2015 event sold out, drew teams from major Boston hospitals and companies like Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson, and Becton Dickinson, and helped make nurse innovation a major search term. 16. Rebecca says Johnson & Johnson later changed a 15-year campaign from thanking nurses to investing in nurse innovation after monitoring the Northeastern program. 17. The interview style is direct and personal, with Bob Kaiser connecting the topic to his own experience caring for his brother for 747 days and counting. 18. The conversation mixes policy, career advice, and institutional history, moving from bedside care to reimbursement models and executive leadership. 19. Nurses, healthcare leaders, and anyone working on staffing reform would get the most from this episode. 20. Listeners looking for light background chatter or short, nontechnical content may skip it.

As heard by us

A nursing story about reimbursement, visibility, and who gets heard.

The episode treats nursing less as a staffing headline than as an economic design problem. It follows how 1930s insurance practices folded nursing into room rates, hid the work from plain sight, and helped drive a major shortage when many nurses left the profession in protest.

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Why you'd press play

If nursing's business model matters to you, start here.

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