By Don Sadler
It was while working as an assistant at a nursing home in high school that Tracy Hoeft-Hoffman decided that she wanted to pursue a career in nursing. “That’s when I saw what a difference nursing can make in people’s lives,” she says. “I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, this is what I need to be doing with my career.’ ”
“But if someone had told me back then that I’d be doing what I do today, I’d have never believed them,” says Hoeft-Hoffman, who up until that time planned to pursue a career in education. “Not that you don’t get a lot of education as a nurse, of course.”
Tracy Hoeft-Hoffman, MBA, MSN, RN, CASC, is the administrator at the Heartland Surgery Center in Kearney, Nebraska.
“No two days are the same,” she says of the job that she has held for the past eight years. “There is always something new, some new challenge or procedure that we’re looking at doing. I wear a lot of different hats – whether it’s jumping in and helping with a patient or talking to the surgeon or figuring out if a procedure is appropriate to perform here or not. And most importantly, making sure that our patients receive excellent care.”
Sometimes, Hoeft-Hoffman admits, she does miss the hands-on aspects of working as a perioperative nurse and taking care of patients. “But I also see what a difference I can make in the role I’m in by taking care of our staff that takes care of our patients,” she says.
Hoeft-Hoffman graduated from nursing school in 1984 and then obtained bachelor’s and master’s degrees in nursing and business. These helped pave the way for her management and leadership roles. The combination of nursing and business degrees has worked out well for her career.
“When a nurse comes to me with something, I understand it from the nurse’s perspective,” she says. “I understand the day-to-day issues nurses face.”
One of the things Hoeft-Hoffman is proudest of in her career is her efforts to get the Nebraska legislature to change state regulations to allow for 23 hour and 59-minute patient stays at ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs).
“Our center is located in a rural area so one of the best ways to grow was to start a total joint program, which we did,” she explains. “The next step was to be able to allow patients to stay in the center for 23 hours if they needed to for post-op pain or for the anesthesia to wear off.”
Hoeft-Hoffman started out by working with the state’s Department of Health and Human Services. After three years, the HHS representative told her the only way the regulation was going to change was for the state legislature to change it.
“I’m pretty sure she thought that would be the end of it,” says Hoeft-Hoffman. “But I wasn’t going to stop there. Our medical director and I met with our state senator and educated him on this issue, including the fact Nebraska was one of 13 states that didn’t allow for 23 hour and 59-minute patient stays at ASCs.”
The senator immediately agreed and said he would introduce legislation to change the time restraint to 23 hours and 59 minutes, which is consistent with CMS regulations.
“We hired a lobbyist for our center and I contacted my peers across the state to have them write letters to their senators,” says Hoeft-Hoffman. “Some of them came to give testimony at the HHS hearing. A week later our senator let us know that the bill was moving onto the legislative floor.”
There was no opposition to the bill on the floor, so it passed and was signed into law by Nebraska’s governor in November of 2020.
Since then, Heartland Surgery Center has expanded by adding 8,800 square feet, including four 23-hour stay rooms. The facility was the first ASC in Nebraska to have 23-hour stay patients, says Hoeft-Hoffman.
Hoeft-Hoffman believes that as the population continues to age, perioperative nurses will be in even higher demand because of the number of procedures they will need.
“Baby boomers who live active lifestyles will have more injuries and are going to need total joint replacements and other types of procedures, which will result in a greater need for perioperative nurses,” she says. “The challenge will be figuring out how to recruit enough young nurses into periop to replace the ones who are retiring because this isn’t an area they get a lot of exposure to in nursing education programs.”
The good news, she believes, is how fast new surgical technology is being introduced that improves patient outcomes. “If someone had told me years ago that we’d be doing things like using guided robots for total joint replacements, I’d have thought they were nuts,” she says. “This makes now a very exciting time to be a perioperative nurse.”
Hoeft-Hoffman is an avid reader, devouring everything from novels to educational, leadership and spiritual books. She recently finished “Practicing the Way: Be With Jesus, Become Like Him, Do As He Did,” which she says gave practical ways to live your life more like Jesus. She also participates in a morning walking group. But her favorite thing is to watch and cheer on her daughter, a competitive figure skater who skates for the University of Nebraska.
“That’s my all-time favorite thing to do,” she says.
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