By Matt Skoufalos
Growing up in California, Jason Goodwin first became interested in health care while working as a lifeguard throughout high school. Early exposure to the ideas that underpin delivery of life-saving treatments, be they administration of first aid or basic life support services, made Goodwin curious about what it would be like to work with the medical staff that performed those jobs.
After high school, he enrolled in junior college, where he could continue his passion for wrestling. However, when his athletic career had run its course, Goodwin decided to enlist in the U.S. Navy to help pay for school. He wanted to become a corpsman, the battlefield medical personnel who embed with the U.S. Marines, but there were no openings. Goodwin was told that, should he begin by studying computers, there might be an opportunity to become a corpsman in the future.
In boot camp, he was invited to compete for an ROTC scholarship that could open the door to continuing his medical education. Goodwin recalled the application process as fairly unceremonious — an officer winnowed down a room of some 500 enlisted personnel to those with the highest SAT scores — and without expectation. Two years into his service, Goodwin learned that he’d been selected for that medical scholarship.
“It was quite a whirlwind,” he said. “I was in Japan, cleaning state rooms for officers, working 16 hours a day, until I earned my way up to the computer room. A week later, I was in ROTC at the University of Southern California-Los Angeles, completely culture-shocked, and starting my training.”
Going from active duty to the reserves, Goodwin attended classes, finished a nursing degree, and was commissioned as an ensign. After a year of night shifts in the medical/surgical unit, his girlfriend (now wife), Kelly, said, “What happens if they send you to war?” It seemed like a distant possibility, until he was ordered to Camp Pendleton.
The couple had a brief wedding with no reception, and not long afterwards, Goodwin shipped out, embedded with the U.S. Marine strike force that breached the Iraqi border on the first night of the March 2003 U.S. invasion.
“It was tip-of-the-spear; a crazy situation,” he said. “We were right behind the battle lines, close enough to where people could get care, and then ship them out on a helicopter. I did work with trauma and surgical patients; I was pre-op, post-op, intra-op. When I saw the surgeries, I got hooked.”
Given the opportunity to select his assignment, Goodwin chose the operating room, and worked various surgical nursing settings — pre-op, post-op, intra-op, and endoscopy — until the conclusion of his military service. His Naval career positioned Goodwin for leadership roles in civilian medicine; subsequently, he spent the rest of his hospital career in management, working his way up to director-level positions, and returning to school to earn his master’s degrees in both nursing administration and public health.
When management roles took him farther and farther from the bedside, Goodwin felt the pull to shift his career focus. In the 20-plus years he’s spent as a nurse, the field of nursing has changed considerably, too.
“When I first got out of school, it was right after “Meet the Parents” came out, so a lot of the comments I got were about being a male nurse,” Goodwin said. “A lot’s changed. Almost half of our workforce seems to be men these days. The pay has risen significantly. The environment has gotten tougher.”
“It’s been a great experience for me,” he said. “I like the bedside, and I like the patient care, but as a leader, I also like to affect many lives and their ability to be able to take care of patients.”
With the advancement of his managerial career, Goodwin gained the benefit of working more closely with different individual surgeons, which helped him appreciate the challenges implicit in that role as much as he understood those that surgical nurses face.
“I think that was a very positive thing that came later in my career, because I’d always understood the plight of the nurse, and got more understanding on how amazing everybody is, including the surgeons,” Goodwin said.
After leaving his career in healthcare management, Goodwin began working as a perioperative nursing consultant, which led to him building additional experience as an expert witness. The shift in perspective gave him a different way of looking at how difficult the variety of roles in health care can be, and in identifying the underlying challenges associated with each, he gained an appreciation for the way in which they all intersect in the operating room.
“We always talk about the evolution of a team, and as a nurse, my vision of that is the doctors coming along,” Goodwin said, “but we’ve all come along, and we all see things differently now.”
Today, Goodwin leverages his myriad experiences in health care as the cofounder of RN Home Office, a startup through which he teaches nurses “how to create their side hustles,” he said; coaching them in the ways to start up home-based businesses with which to supplement their nursing careers.
“Our solution to the nursing crisis is not that people need to leave, but back off the shift, and create a second stream of revenue so you don’t have to be back in the trenches again,” Goodwin said. “Don’t rely on somebody else to change that for you; change it yourself.
“We teach people how to do it in nursing; we don’t teach you how to start a finance company,” he said. “It’s using your clinical background to finance yourself.”
RN Home Office helps nurses learn how to market themselves to clients, and teaches them to become thought leaders who drive people to their businesses through their clinical position in the market.
“It’s a very different environment than 60 hours a week in the hospital,” Goodwin said.
Today, Jason and Kelly have been married for 22 years, and are proud parents to 17-year-old Paige, who will attend UC-Davis in the fall, and 15-year-old Palmer, who dreams of a pro football career.
Professional Spotlight Nomination
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