Mary Mahoney Professional Nurses Organization

Veronica Foster-Jones

When Veronica Foster-Jones was a little girl growing up in the Bronx, she had her mother's choice of a career: Teacher or nurse.

"You know how it was with a mother like mine," she laughs now. "But if it had been up to me, I think I would have gone into business - some kind of management in the business world."

Odd how things turn out.

Over the 20 years since that decision, Veronica's nursing career has taken many twists and turns - from routine nursing roles to helping triage wounded military personnel after a training accident in Germany, to a policy development role with the Veterans Administration, and to setting up Pierce County's innovative breast and cervical cancer program for low-income women.

Working with the Washington State, MAA Care Coordination Section's Disease Management Project, she holds an M.B.A. in health-care administration and is working on her doctorate in applied management and decision science focusing on information systems.

And somewhere along the path, she stepped well beyond simple patient care and into a business-management role, supervising health-care systems, not individual clients.

Nor is that the only thing unorthodox about this unusual woman. When Veronica needs to let down her hair after a tough day on the job, she joins her friends in the local chapter of the National Association of Black Scuba Drivers.

She also is a student of racial and cultural disparities in health care, and an early advocate for the rich mix of talents and resources needed to make sure that all clients receive high quality health care. She remembers from her German nursing background a case in which a patient, speaking German, was being dismissed as crazy by others. But because she knew both German and medicine, she could pick up traces that told her the man was actually using medical terms to describe his condition. She called for a medical interpreter, who helped pin down the problem and thus identify the treatment.

In the 1990s, she moved to Lacey with her then-husband, a career solider, and found a job with the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department, helping develop the county's Breast and Cervical Cancer Program, and later moved to the Department of Health working with the statewide program. She also worked for MultiCare, developing an ambulatory case management program for the frail elderly, and - as always - establishing her reputation as a problem-fixer.

In 2002, she joined the Care Coordination Section in the Division of Program Support in MAA, where she joined a team getting the MAA Disease Management project off the ground. That project, which operates through two contractors to help manage the care of high-risk clients with four chronic conditions - asthma, diabetes, heart failure, and kidney disease.

Disease management, Veronica says, is a "very comprehensive way of looking at the person as a whole, to help them manage their chronic conditions through education, better decision making, skills in the use of medical care, PLUS intensive one-on-one advocating for clients who are not able to do it for themselves."
She returned to VA Puget Sound Healthcare System in Seattle as the Nurse Manager for Nurse Information Systems as she continues to pursue her doctoral studies.

So how does she rate a good day on the job? "It's juggling lots of things," she says, laughing. "You have to manage the chaos and achieve results. "I just enjoy having fun doing interesting things to improve healthcare!"