For this Change Makers in Washington Nursing interview, WCN interviewed David Reyes, DNP, MPH, RN, PHNA-BC, and Dean of the UW-Tacoma School of Nursing and Healthcare Leadership and Interim Dean at UW-Tacoma School of Urban Studies.
WCN: Can you share a little about yourself?
Reyes: My dad was in the Air Force. Because of that, I was born in the Netherlands. From the Netherlands, we moved back to the U.S. to live in California, and then we went back to Europe and lived in Germany for almost four years so I lived abroad for much of my formative childhood. Then we moved back to the U.S., to Washington State, because my father was posted to the former McCord Air Force Base before it was Joint Base Lewis-McChord. From about age 8 to my junior year of high school, I lived in what is now Lakewood. For my junior and senior years, I moved to Seattle to attend High School Seminary. I thought I had a religious vocation at the time. So, my last couple of years growing up were spent in Seattle.
I attended Seattle University but didn’t go right into nursing. I started as a history major and have a minor in history now. History and culture have always been my foundational interests in life. But healthcare, I came into that later. At the time, you didn’t see many male nurses. I always say I am an accidental nurse because it wasn’t until I got a work-study job at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center during the third year of my history degree that I was exposed to healthcare in a way that piqued my interest.
It was the late 70s, and I was working in a lab connected to the bone marrow transplant unit doing genetic confirmation tests. I worked with research scientists there to confirm whether people had a certain kind of leukemia. I also had the opportunity to go on the grand rounds, where I heard about each patient and how they were responding to treatments. Working with science and people sounded very interesting to me.
I also knew I couldn’t spend my life in a lab looking through a microscope. I loved the research but was drawn to what the care team was doing and hearing the nurses talk about what was going on with patients. And because I was at Seattle U, where they have a College of Nursing, I had friends in the nursing program. I talked to them more about what they did and determined that was what I wanted to do, too.
I made an appointment with the dean of the School of Nursing, Dr. Pat Ferris, and told her I wanted to be a nurse. She asked me why. Part of the reason was my personal experience growing up. My father had heart disease and was in and out of hospitals a fair amount. I was also the oldest of seven children and often took on the caregiving role to help with my siblings, which I found I liked. That paired with my work study experience, and it all felt like it fit together. She signed my transfer paper right there. And that is how, three years into my history degree, I changed course to become a nurse.
The following year (my fourth year of college), I started nursing school as a sophomore at Seattle University. In my junior year, I started working at Swedish Hospital as a junior nursing student. After finishing my senior year and getting my license, I stayed at Swedish, going from no experience to really understanding what working in healthcare was about. Those days were formative for me.
WCN: Can you tell us about your nursing journey so far?
Reyes: While at Swedish, I worked in a med surg unit for around four years. With my grounding in med surge, I moved into the operating room, where I spent the next 12 years as an operating room nurse specializing in orthopedic surgery.
During this time, I took on my first educator role as a clinical educator for orthopedics in the surgical service department at Swedish. That is where my love of education started to develop. A couple of years later, I became a department educator, where I ended up teaching both within the department and in the perioperative nursing education consortium teaching new OR nurses.
Around 1993, managed care came to the forefront, and along with that, healthcare reform. Many of us in health education and quality improvement were laid off because we weren’t direct patient providers.
The situation gave me time to reflect on what I wanted to do next in my career and reawakened my love for community and public health. I had already been doing per diem in-home care work. And I loved it! So, I applied to graduate school and started the UW Master of Nursing program, focusing on public health and nursing leadership. I also decided to get a Master of Public Health, where I focused on social behavioral sciences.
While finishing my degrees, I started working for the Seattle King County Health Department at the Kent Public Health Center as a clinical supervisor. While there, I worked with public health nurses and used my training to supervise health clinics, teen clinics, primary care clinics, pediatric clinics, and more. I spent 17 years with Seattle King County Health and served in many leadership roles as I moved to other health clinics.
In 2009, I decided to return to school to get my DNP focusing on population health and health systems, which I finished in 2013. Again, I found myself exploring what to do next. After talking with colleagues at UW-Tacoma about teaching opportunities, I applied for an open position and was hired as an assistant professor in 2014. From there, I became an associate professor and, in 2022, was asked to take the interim dean role, which I did. The following year, I applied for the permanent role, and after the search process, I was appointed dean.
WCN: Through your leadership, how do you work to impact nursing and the advancement of health equity in Washington?
Reyes: I’ve tried to recognize my position as a nurse and nurse leader by being a role model. As a young nurse, I didn’t see nurse leaders who looked like me or supported what I wanted to do. It’s important to me to show all nurses their capacity to be leaders, whether they look like me or not. Leadership and engagement don’t need a title. Leadership is a part of the nursing skill set. When I talk to nursing students now, I let them know they can be leaders, too. I ask them to look at the spaces where they are in their communities, institutions, hospitals, or where they work and let them know that as nurses in those spaces, they are already leaders.
The other part of leadership for me is the importance of understanding how the decisions we make affect other people. Before turning towards spaces of equity and inclusion, we must first look internally and ask what beliefs or assumptions we hold that we need to work on or change. We must ask ourselves how our assumptions impact other people. And I have done that throughout my career. I have focused a lot on undoing and addressing institutional racism and looking at the effects of decisions at a systems level. As leaders, we need to be engaged in constant reflection.
In addition, in my past research, I was very committed to community-based participatory research. I was driven by what’s important to the community versus imposing what’s important to me. I asked how I could support them while at the same time enabling and growing leaders in their community. I firmly believe in engaging community members in research work, like training them to facilitate focus groups or interviews. That also includes having them look at the information that comes in, and help interpret it. That is where the strength and importance of equity and inclusion lies—in having respect for those communities.
Research shows that when you have diverse voices and opinions, you become more creative in problem-solving and finding mutually satisfying solutions.
WCN: What are some of the overall challenges you face in your work? And how do you work to overcome those challenges?
Reyes: One overall challenge is how slow things can move. I have worked in public health and academia, and being a leader calls for patience. You need to know when to advocate and challenge the system to look at things differently. When things are moving slowly, I ask myself, is this something that needs to move quicker or not? What is the priority for this? I ask other people, too. I approach my work from a quality improvement perspective since that has been a part of my professional development. That includes looking at things from a systems improvement perspective. Understanding that systems can be slow, it is important to push the system to change for the right reasons. Big systems have layers, and it makes things challenging. As a leader, I need to ask where I have the locus of control and influence and leverage that with other parts of the system and people to make progress.
Finally, don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. If the progress you make is moving things in the right direction, ask yourself if that is good enough. And most of the time, the answer is, for now, yes.
WCN: What progress towards supporting a diverse and highly skilled nursing workforce in Washington do you find encouraging? And where do you see we still have work to do?
Reyes: People need to see themselves in spaces where they are being cared for. If you go to the hospital and see someone who looks like you, you are more likely to think they can empathize with you from the perspective of one of the many different identities that shape us.
At UW, we have a diverse student body. These students continue to come to the UW to learn, what it means to do this kind of work thoughtfully using a social justice and equity lens. I find this hopeful.
But there is always progress to make. We need more people of color and other diverse backgrounds in education, particularly in education leadership. We must look at how we can diversify leadership in a way that shows younger nurses that they can do this, too. I do this through mentorship. I continue to participate in the WCN Diverse Nurse Faculty Mentorship program. And I still mentor my first mentee from 2021, and that person has now moved into a leadership role.
The next generation of nurse leaders is out there. We must commit to mentoring and providing them with the support they need because they are encountering challenges within their institutions and our profession. Nursing still has a lot within our discipline to address. Racism, genderism, and other types of inequity are still too prevalent. Nursing as a profession still has its own history to face. And we need to reconcile it if we are going to make progress. If you are a novice nurse, your voice is imperative. And if you are a senior nurse, we must listen to those voices.
And, for anyone who might be reading this, we all know the phrase imposter syndrome. But we must keep talking about what that means and recognize that we are each on a professional development journey.
When we come into any new role, whether in leadership, being a new faculty, or a new job, it can be normal to second guess yourself. That can be a hard thing to overcome. But if you recognize where your growth point is and ask for help, you are on the right track.
