Heather Ritter is a Clinical Nurse Educator who goes above and beyond in her work, supporting new staff, encouraging professional growth, and addressing educational needs. Heather emphasizes the importance of a trusting, engaged, healthy work environment and is often a catalyst for camaraderie. Heather shares staff vacation or pet photos on the hallway monitors and encourages group photos during potlucks and gatherings. Heather helps new staff to build rapport and welcomes them in weekly huddles. She works diligently to ensure the staff's onboarding experience is smooth and prioritizes the well-being of her staff, carefully matching each new hire to preceptors whose personalities and styles are fitting for the new nurse. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Heather and her colleagues built a skills fair for nurses on surgical floors to ensure nurses' confidence and competence in managing orthopedic patients. This skills fair will soon be adapted to the rest of the medical-surgical units to support ongoing skill development.

Heather promotes professional development on a unit and organizational level. When two nurses expressed discomfort with the code cart and AED, she registered them for advanced training. After training, the nurses exuded confidence and presented their new knowledge to their colleagues. As a nurse planner for Froedtert Hospital's Schwartz Center Rounds, a multidisciplinary forum for clinicians to discuss social and emotional issues faced when caring for patients, Heather ensures the voice of nursing is included to emphasize the impact of nursing to audiences and participants. She dedicates herself to orthopedic nursing through her engagement in the National Association of Orthopedic Nurses and ensures members engage in professional development and education that progresses orthopedic nursing knowledge across the region. Heather encourages Froedtert nurses to attend annual orthopedic nursing conferences and regularly encourages nurses to gain their orthopedic nursing certification.

Heather participates in interdisciplinary collaboration to support practice. During weekly huddles, she routinely invites interdisciplinary team members to huddle to nurture interprofessional relationships and eliminate knowledge gaps. When nurses expressed discomfort with newer brace models, Heather developed a braces series with therapists, where therapists demonstrated braces weekly. Heather also has hospitalists present a topics to support relationships with the medicine consult service. Heather helps prime positive relationships with orthopedic residents by hosting an onboarding to learn about inpatient orthopedic nursing before they begin their residency. Heather also serves as a Clinical Nurse Educator representative on the Froedtert Hospital Nursing Quality shared governance committee and the Nursing Pain and Comfort Committee, supporting nurses in shared decision-making. Heather worked with interdisciplinary teams to adopt a new drain-removal policy in her department, expanding the capabilities of registered nurses to the full extent of their licenses. Additionally, Heather helped launch an inpatient-outpatient collaboration to help charge nurses and RNs build relationships between care areas and facilitate high-quality transitions of care for the orthopedic population, winning the 2020 Froedtert Hospital Evidence-Based Practice Project award.