In this podcast, Karen and Antra sit down with Zach Smith, a nurse entrepreneur based out of Oregon. They run the gamut in this conversation, covering the early struggles that Zach encountered in his early career. This includes the fractured methods used to pathwork together a preceptorship, feeling like you’re not fitting in, the animosity you can be faced with when you dare to ask a physician a question, to ultimately finding his nursing niche in mental health. The conversation then dives into the pitfalls that exist in the current nursing school world. Nurses are woefully prepared for the real world, and the discussion touches on the high attrition rates seen in new nurses within the 2 years of them graduating school. They discuss the fact that nurses use so little of what they learn in school and the fact that institutions don’t connect nurses to enough of the real world of healthcare for them to be successful. Furthermore, the ambitious entrepreneur takes us through his work on a nurse-focused scheduling app that eventually was sold to a large enterprise, to his huge ambitions of changing the way that hospitals are accredited with a patient and staff focused approach. Get a CE for listening to this episode via https://www.rnegade.pro -| The Nurse Podcast Channel is made possible with support from IHI. Learn more about how IHI is transforming health care education at IHI.org -| This episode originally aired on November 2, 2022 on RNegade. Listen, follow and subscribe here.