As a registered nurse of 25 years, Robin Gates understands that patients should feel seen, heard, and valued. As St. Ann Center’s new Director of Nursing, Robin strives to continue emphasizing that ethos at the Stein and Bucyrus campuses.
“This is a place that ensures integrity, and the acknowledgement of humanity,” Robin said. “It’s important to me that nobody ever looks at St. Ann Center as a place where people are just dropped off.”
In the newly created role, Robin’s purview is anything that relates to the health and well-being of the clients. She works with the registered nurses, licensed practical nurses, certified nursing assistants, and personal care workers in the adult day services and temporary overnight respite care units at the Stein and Bucyrus campuses.
“We have great nurses who’ve impressed me; I feel fortunate to collaborate with them,” she said. “Because of Sr. Edna’s legacy, I want to be sure we continue to operate at the highest level possible – our clients deserve it.”
Examples of adult clients’ various physical healthcare needs could be medication, toileting assistance or assessment for seizure or stroke risk. Carefully planned activities address clients’ socialization and mental health care needs.
Robin may get called to childcare, too, when a child sustains an injury or falls ill. She also assists childcare administrators with guidance on handling contagious childhood disease outbreaks, such as hand, foot and mouth disease.
“I don’t see any silos in this organization,” she said, adding that her goal is to ensure that the entire St. Ann Center family is whole and as healthy as possible.
Robin has a varied background in nursing and healthcare leadership — a path she likened to “a walk through Disneyland, wanting to try this ride or look at that adventure.” She’s worked in settings such as emergency care, labor and delivery, clinic management, transitional care, clinical trials, organ and tissue donation, and academia. She holds a master’s degree in nursing, an MBA, and a bachelor’s degree in registered nursing.
The self-described “lifelong learner,” is a doctoral candidate in Marquette University’s Policy and Leadership in Higher Education, and she teaches in the nursing program at Milwaukee School of Engineering.
A New Jersey native whose career has also taken her to Michigan, Minnesota and Georgia, Robin learned about St. Ann Center and its intergenerational model through contacts at the Black Nurses Association in Milwaukee, in conversations about building community connections. She began bringing her students here for clinicals.
“Nurses should understand that they can work in many different environments besides hospitals,” she said. “The services here offer a fabulous opportunity to see the vision that Sr. Edna had for intergenerational care.”
Robin believes participating in client experiences such as relationship building and serving memory care clients can offer nurses job satisfaction far beyond a fast-paced ER setting.
Nursing a Lifelong Passion for Helping Others
As a child in New Jersey, Robin actually enjoyed visiting the doctor, fascinated by how he helped people recover and feel better. At her family’s church, Robin fondly recalls a warm, caring parishioner, who was a registered nurse and “left a deep impression on me.”
More recently, the late Candace “Candy” Hennessy, a registered nurse who also held a doctorate, took Robin under her wing when she moved to Milwaukee, and introduced her to the Black Nurses Association. Other Wisconsin mentors include Mary Beth Kingston, recently retired Chief Nursing Officer for Advocate Aurora Heath, who shaped Robin’s holistic view of nursing, and Colleen McCarthy, vice president of Organ and Tissue at Versiti Wisconsin, who introduced her to work with organ and tissue transplants. As an African-American woman, Robin said, that was a nursing specialty that she hadn’t explored.
“It’s a difficult topic in our culture, due to experimental research that happened in our history, such as the Tuskegee Project,” Robin said. “There are negative connotations, but through this work I was able to help turn a terrible story into something positive.”
As an advocate for diversity in nursing and promoting policy for healthy nurses and patients, Robin has earned accolades for her leadership. This year, she was named ATL+ Magazine’s “50 Most Powerful Women of Atlanta.”
“I want nurses to know they understand their power, and how they can advocate for vulnerable populations,” she said. “Once you understand that, the sky is the limit to what you can do to support people with their health needs. That carries into this role for me.”
