Fighting Violence in the Nursing Workplace with Mel Cortez
Mel Cortez has been a nurse for 15 years, and an entrepreneur for many of those years. She sees a gap in nursing and finds solutions. In this episode, Mel describes how she was faced with a violent patient in a small community hospital. When Mel and others were harmed by this patient, including her coworkers and other patients, she decided it was time to take action against the abuse. She took a “ground up” approach - teaching nurses to fight back - both literally and figuratively.
Mel reached out to her military friends and asked if they could help her develop a training program that nurses, and others who work in healthcare facilities, could learn not only to prevent violent attacks but also to put them in the best position if they found themselves in a potentially violent situation. Mel created Cortex Gold, a company that takes that training and makes it attainable by offering it in a variety of options. She will also come into hospitals and make it a facility-wide training.
Mel Cortez is making the workplace a safer place. If you are threatened by violence or want the knowledge to prevent harm to yourself, your coworkers, or your patients, Cortex Gold is something to check out.
ABOUT MEL
Mel Cortez graduated from Towson University with a Bachelor of Science in Nursing. As a Critical Care Travel Nurse for over 10 years, she has been in many facilities across the country. In addition to Nursing Supervision roles in acute care, Mel has held various management positions within Home Health, Hospice, and Long-Term Care prior to returning to the bedside to serve as a Critical Care Traveler in the Northeast in March of 2020.
After 2 pivotal years caring for patients in the COVID-19 Pandemic, she then chose to launch the Cortex Brand, a solution-based business. Cortex’s latest project, Cortex Gold has a primary focus on creating a Gold Standard for Healthcare Security while reducing the rising violence at the bedside through tactical, practical innovations in the realms of product, training, and research. She is a content expert in regards to Healthcare Workforce Satisfaction and Retention, Workplace Violence Reduction, and the implementation of systems-wide training programs that are both cost-effective and delivered efficiently during operational tempo. She is the CEO and Founder of TACTBook the first Nonprofit-based workplace violence reduction Textbook and Clinical Violence Reduction Training Program.
Mel holds licensure in North Carolina and Texas and is a member of the TNA, ANA, and IAHSS (International Association of Healthcare Security).
LINKS
Read Mel's work Latinas in Nursing: Stories of determination, inspiration, and trust
Listen to Mel on the Tactical Scrubs podcast.
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Beth Quaas
Hello everyone thanks for being here. This is don't eat. You're young. I'm your host, Beth Kwas. Today I am super excited to have Mel Cortez on the show. If you are a nurse working out and you are experiencing violence or heard of violence in your facility or have experienced it yourself. Mel is here to save the day. She has developed a concept where she comes into facilities. She teaches nurses, healthcare workers, security people how to stay safe and deal with those patients. So I am so excited to have her here today. Please welcome Mel Cortez to the show. Mel, I'm so happy to have you on the show today. Thanks for coming on. As a guest.
Mel Cortez
I'm happy to be here. This is so exciting. I love doing podcasts because I feel like it's a great way for nurses and other people to listen as they're going along about their day or doing things and then they can get all the great knowledge that they need and via audio and video. If you have that capability so.
Beth Quaas
Fantastic. And we have a lot to talk about today. I am so excited about what you are doing. But first tell our listeners where you've been in nursing, what you're doing now.
Mel Cortez
Yeah. So I became a nurse in 2008. I started my journey there. And so throughout that process of becoming a I have a BSN, I never really wanted to be a nurse. There's lots of people that say that they grew up wanting to be a nurse. That was not me. My dad handed me Forbes magazine. Like, these are the next top up and coming careers. You can pick one of those if you want our help with funding for college. And so I did. And I like biology, so I wasn't going to be a dolphin trainer, not on my dad's dime anyway. So I became a nurse, and I'm really happy I did. I spent the initial parts of my career, you know, in cardiac care, did a lot of step down from CVICU. And then I went to the ICU. And just fell in love with critical care. I I really enjoyed that process and then moved there to some management on assisted. Acute care post acute care then did some home health Hospice, and then the entire time that I did travel nursing for the last 10 years as an ICU nurse, I always kept a PRN Hospice job or home health job or something, kept myself busy. And then I tried various companies. I did like a patient advocacy business. I thought I wanted to be a legal nurse. Consultant. I did like a Wellness program for nurses, and that started off as just like a video series during COVID. I had learned some tools and techniques to help me stay able to keep taking care of patients. And I think that. You know it, it was an opportunity for me to learn about business and how to grow a business. And you know from there we just pivoted and cortex became, you know, this security business. Who, if you told me? Ten years ago that I was going to be like a nurse and security. I've been like, whatever. Like. No, I'm not. No way. And so now I just saw a need, you know, the the violence is getting bad. And I wanted to.
Beth Quaas
Help. I think what you are doing is. So needed. It's so amazing. So entrepreneurship is in your blood. It sounds like you've already been there, and now you're going to grow. What you're doing now. So talk to us a little bit. Can you take us back to when you think you decided this was the need and why you needed to develop? The concept that you're developing.
Mel Cortez
Yeah. So back when we started the Wellness company, that's where the name cortex comes from. You know where Texas based company, my last name is Cortez, but tech, the cortex is the largest site of neuronal integration in the brain. So it's where everything connects and fires there. And I said, you know, nurses really are the Nexus of care. Like, we're down here at the bedside. Doing everything but the systems issues are not connected. It's like so how could I create something that enhanced connection and initially it was, you know, with yourself and being able to remain a professional. But while go through a pandemic and it, everyone was very emotional and you've got this sea of women, you know, women are just naturally emotional. And so how do we create emotional regulation enough to control the our day to control the stress response. And then I realized that that nurses were ready to hear that. Yet they were still knee deep in the pandemic like they. We were still, you know, Intubating colleagues. So it was not a time where people wanted to hear about resiliency and, you know, building the profession and so.
Beth Quaas
Right.
Mel Cortez
So what they really started caring about was this this violence. And I was a nursing supervisor as a travel nurse in a small rural hospital. And there was a psych patient in the back of the hospital in the back of the Ed and holding. He was really manic. The cops had been there all day with him. As soon as they left, he got angry. And the police had used some pain response tactics on him when he was back there. And so they were managing him like that. And then when they left, we let them do that to him. You know, we became the people that stood there and watched them use pressure points and things. And I said. You know? Then he got a hold of a metal mop and he beat us all like he attacked us all. And then I was taking care of two COVID ICU patients up front because I was the only ICU nurse on staff that day at that small Community Hospital and was also a nursing supervisor. So it was terrible. So I was up there running drips and. The patient got between me and the psych patient, got between me and my other patient, and I've fought as hard as I could, but unfortunately the pressers ran dry and the patient died, and as a result of that I realized that there just needed to be a better system. I didn't have the tools that I needed to do my job. At that point, right, like I took an oath and I couldn't fulfill my oath. And so that's when I. Realized that workplace violence was part of the job now and we need to be prepared. And so I was a military wife for 12 years, so I knew that there were really highly trained security professionals. You know, I met them, I had dinner at the table with them. And so I reached out to that community. And I always say that. Innovation in healthcare happens at the bedside of our soldier, sailors and marines. Right. Penicillin. You know, infection protocols. So when I asked for them for help, they came running. I mean, I am incredibly humbled by the support and encouragement that people on my founding team have had. When I said, look, we have to prevent nurses from becoming victims, what can you teach me? And so my co-founder is United States Marine and. Is an executive protection professional, so these guys are like on celebrities details, right? They protect congressmen and senators and but they're soft skills or their skills and security like what we term deescalation, those type of skills and situational awareness. And just ability to negotiate with people, they're really, really great at that because they can't be like body slamming people to the ground, right. You know, on TV. So a lot of times, especially now that we're the media, anybody with the phone can record whatever's going on at any point. So whether hospitals start projecting what's going on inside their hospitals or patients start recording, we're gonna start getting what's really going on inside. And so I want to be an advocate to, for hospitals to to come to and say, OK, this is a solution, there's multiple solutions out there. There's like 25 camera. Companies there's like a million now AI tech companies and what what PPE does my staff need? Which training program do I use and that's where I figured out that I wanted to pivot cortex into cortex gold, which was. This guiding organizational leadership to deliver. And whether that's a safety and security solution, whether it's a research project that helps with nursing innovation in regards to workplace violence reduction or it might be, you know, consulting, figuring out if they do need a threat expert or someone in the industry to come in and help them a little bit more, they can reach out to me as a nurse. And I can look at this, the organization from the ground. Build up and I think that's different than a high level consultant who looks at the organization from the top down and yeah. So that's how, that's how I got started. And now we've moved to start a nonprofit division called Tact Book. I knew that nurses needed better training and we needed.
Beth Quaas
That's incredible.
Mel Cortez
More deliverable training. We can go those week long training programs we have to like find time in your schedule personally and professionally to get there just isn't it anymore. You know we can use VR, we can use, you know, video content. But there still needs to be a hands on component and a simulation because the violence is physical. It's not just if you're within arms reach of a patient, you can potentially be a victim of violence. So we want to provide that physical portion. But how do we do that rapidly, you know, and get everybody trained to the same standard well. For CPR and ACL S, so we modeled the training off of that. That those with the standard algorithm standard medication recommendations. But I knew that I didn't have the knowledge to, like do all of that right. I was like that. This is a huge program. This is a huge national initiative. I read that OSHA. Put out a panel to ask people to contribute to try and help workplace violence, and the answer was like. We couldn't even start incident reporting because it would be unduly burdensome to list all of the incidents that happen every day and. I'm like but I. I deserve to be heard and I deserve to have my incident be reported, whether it's burdensome or not, because. I'm the one dealing. With the burden, you know I'm carrying that burden, so. I wanted to formulate a standardized approach so that we could standardize the verbiage to get the data that we would need and help organizations to leverage the technology that's currently there to help generate the the reporting, and then from that we can look at trends. And we can see this portion of, you know, our program works well and this portion doesn't work well or why isn't it working well. And then we can ask our experts to make those modifications there. So right now our Advisory Board is upwards of 15 experts from across the globe and the industry we have anesthesiologists, we have an Ed physician, we've got pharmacists, we've got nurses in the UK focus on one division like did you know that when they go to school there, they pick like whether you're going to be a mental health nurse? Are there going to be a child nurse or a? Labor nurse and they specialize from the very beginning.
Beth Quaas
Yeah, I have heard that. But it's such a different way than we do things here. I think it's incredible.
Mel Cortez
Yeah. So those mental health nurses are like, really, really, really good. And they have different standards. So I kind of wanted to see what they offered. So we added Laura Smith, who's, like a top nurse over there. And Dean Malpass, who's another another really famous up and coming. Nurse advisor in the security space. And so then we started reaching out to Australia and South Africa and we've got people from. You know Singapore and Pakistan and the top voices all over because I was like, if we're going to create a solution, we should create a global solution with the way technology is incorporated now we're not, you know, getting on boats and sailing across. You know, we can zoom and train people and so and it offers more opportunities for research. So I feel like nurses want a way that they can feel like they can participate to help save the profession and. The textbook is a way to start giving that. Mentality to them, before they even hit the floor like we are doing something, we're going to fix things when you get out there. This is what you're going to see. But if you use these skills along the way, you'll greatly reduce your chance of being a victim of violence and you can still participate in the research. You can still be part of this. Initiative to change the future of healthcare together.
Beth Quaas
I think what you're doing is just well thought out. This isn't a fly by night kind of thing. You have really looked at every Ave. to make sure this is successful. One thing that you said which makes me sad, is that this is part of our reality. Now. It is part of our job description which. It shouldn't be, but it is. And so I think you're definitely taking that first step in how can we save ourselves from that? You're also taking it to the facility level, so it's not just. You know, like you said, for the nurse, but you're training facilities as well, right? Hospitals, but that you are starting from the ground up, but you're training at the top as well.
Mel Cortez
Yeah. And I think that's one of the things that I. I was always challenged with people. I heard this Marcus Aurelius quote and Marcus Aurelius was a Roman emperor. For people that are listening that don't know. And he has this concept of still was Stoicism. That's very famous. And he basically had a diary. And the man was so like eloquent. That his diary became known as Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, and it's a it's a little it's just his literally his thoughts and like this man was brilliant, like his thoughts are like gorgeous. Like where do I find a man like that, you know? But I was reading through it and he one of the things that he says is the obstacle is the way. And every obstacle that I heard, when you look at healthcare sales, it's like a very difficult vertical to scale. It's very niche. There's a lot of regulatory components and in. In the words of my friend Dean, that's now working with us, he says, you know, everything's sort of. Policy regulated philosophically like, you know, but it's not actually so when people are looking from the outside trying to understand they have a they have a hard time understanding if the policy and procedures so highly regulated. But then you don't have a policy and procedure for core things that you think that you would have. And so as you're navigating through that really difficult space. I think. For nurses who maybe are looking at wanting to start their own business or thinking like, hey, should I do this or is there something I can do on the side to help supplement my income or where can I use my knowledge somewhere else? It's understanding that you can't go against the organizations because the organizations are the way that we're structured currently. And by trying to. Push blame on them and work against them. You're not helping us collectively, and that was a really hard pill to swallow. Like that was difficult for me because I was like what they should advocate for me and they should care because I'm doing all this for. Them, but they don't. So once you understand that, that's just not. There's no feelings in business. And that's been something that, as an entrepreneur, was very difficult for me to learn, you know, especially with interpersonal relationships and other things that you experience in business, you have to understand that when you make a business decision, you have to take your emotions out of it. And there's a way to be professional and empathetic in your business and doing business with kindness. But you can't be emotional because that's not professional. And I think lots of older, seasoned nurses had gotten to that point and now they're gone. So there's no one teaching professionalism. At the bedside and now you've got incivility matched with you're no longer seen as an authority figure by the patient because of COVID. And depending on what their Facebook feed looked like, you're like, you know, a sheet. You know, I was in a grocery store one time wearing a mask because I had COVID, and I was super sick, and I didn't want to, like, be coughing on the vegetables. But like I had to go grocery shopping, you know? And I'm in this. I I was. My ex was stationed in rural North Carolina. Yeah. And I'm in the grocery store, and this guy comes up. He goes. You're a sheep. And I was like, actually, I just intubated 4 people today, so I was really trying not to get everybody else sick. But that moral distress that we faced on top of the way that they're treating you now at the bedside. But people don't remember healthcare before it became. This incivility, this incivility, was just blatant and I think a lot of us that do remember it's heartbreaking and we don't really know what to do about it. And I said this at least, is an opportunity for people to get involved, like people to do something, you know.
Beth Quaas
Right. Yeah. I you hit the nail on the head. We have to change the way we're thinking and in order to find a solution, we have to work with everybody that's involved and that does involve people that don't understand what we do. So we have to try to get them to understand where we're coming from. You being a nurse is why this is going to succeed. Though, as we've talked about. Before we recorded today.
Mel Cortez
I hope so. I hope so because it has to.
Beth Quaas
You understand what the need is. We're not there to take down. Patients that are trying to be unruly, we're trying to help protect ourselves.
Mel Cortez
Right, right, right. And I think there's no, that's one of the biggest things that I find value when I even when I speak somewhere. And they might be calling me in to speak about entrepreneurship or like innovation or but I'm like, look. I have you in front of me for 45 minutes and in that 45 minutes, if I can give you a tip that I have learned from some of the best security experts in the world on how to protect you or your children or whatever you're doing today, then I have that moral obligation to give you that during this time and and as a nurse, you know, I took an oath.
Beth Quaas
I love.
Mel Cortez
To to. Take care of everyone and to do no harm. So for to to if you're going to come to a training program and teach me how to do a pressure point. On someone I I can't, I can't legally do that in good conscience because I I'm going to feel some sort of way about it because I'm a I'm gonna. I'm a human now. If I'm becoming a victim and they're killing me and choking me and you know, and that's the only thing that I have to use. That's a different story. But should it be written into policy and procedure? And standardized training. No, it I don't. I don't think that use of force is appropriate. And I think that's where organizations get stuck. And remember how I said the obstacle is the way. If you don't want to deal with it, you just don't deal with it at all. And then now we're all liable. So like, my security friends are like, now you have to use pressure points. There's no way you can't not do that. What if someone's killing you? And then on the other side, the nursing people are like we can't touch her. We can't do anything. And if they fall out of the bed, then you're in trouble. So. You have to stand there and let them hit you. And I'm like there has to be some middle ground here. There. It can't be one or the other. And what is that middle ground? Look like what does? How do we train to it and how do we do the research to prove that it's the correct middle ground and as our community and environments and our demographics and weapons and things change and progress, can we have a standardized approach that can capture the data and allow for us to make modifications in the spaces? Where we need to to prevent more violence in the future. So
Beth Quaas
Talk a little bit about what you. Offer. What are you teaching nurses in your training courses?
Mel Cortez
Yeah. So depending on the format, right, ideally the format is that an organization comes to us and says, Mel, we want your training for a whole system or a whole hospital because we want everybody to be on the same page. So then I say to them, give me anybody that's currently teaching CPR, if they're teaching CPR or a CLS, then I want to train them. On this, this program, and so those folks go out and train everybody in a patient care environment and then they will from that point be able to learn. Earn in an online hybrid immersive approach, so we push out the beginning. Coursework is like an adaptive learning profile so they can go on and do 15 minute modules. They can listen to podcasts, they can listen to watch some videos, but ultimately they have to click through scenarios and their scenario is not going to be the. Same as the person next to them. And they can do that. We're hoping to get it to the point where they can do that through a mobile app. When they just do that on their app, they can game. It's a little bit gamified. They continue their training and they get NFT's or non fungible tokens. They get little gold coins just like Mario, right? You like you go through the game and once you finish those, you can actually use those on our online store. And so if an organization is looking for a way to incentivize training. They can purchase that package as as an additional portion, they can put their own merchandise on there. We have some really cool tactical stuff we have. Like bite proof slash proof arm guards. So like for security officers who have to look through bags and there might be a knife or something to scratch them or cut them and it's then they have like these jackets. I have a jacket on. And like if someone were to come at me with a knife, it wouldn't cut through the jacket, it could bruise me for sure and like. It would hurt, but nothing's gonna break this. And it also you learn to use those things in the training in collaboration with going to to attempt to manage someone with a weapon or behavioral issues. So that portion of the later training is done in a physical component where you would go just like a CLS and do your skills check off or CPR and do your skills check off. So. The person at the organization can check them off, or you can go to a local ALS or BLS training center and get your skills checked of
Beth Quaas
That is, that's just amazing to me that you have thought about it. From the working person's perspective, how do you find the time and that is exactly right? Everybody that works in the hospital that's taking care of patients. Is does BLS? And many of them do Acls and the time is there.
Mel Cortez
And they get paid to go do their training, and the hospitals internalize that training to make it cheaper. And then they build it out so we don't charge licensing fees either. So like a well known and I tell people, I am not the. Learn to deescalate a psych patient over a four month period. Training like that is not what we're doing. You know, there are great programs like that, but we are teaching rapidly deployable training and we do teach security as well. So there's been a lot of attempts at providing training for security, but security. Officers are just not seen as professionals in. This in in the environment when really they are, they're sometimes they're coming off of like, you know, Paul Bart mall cop and then dropped into an ER within a week and expected to know what to do. And that's just not safe. And so the International Association of Healthcare Safety and Security is a is an awesome organization that I have found to be. Extremely beneficial for me as an. Nurse. But it's traditionally just security officers, security directors, but these guys are brilliant, like some of them were like CIA agents. Like they are awesome. They did whole long careers and then transitioned to healthcare. And they're like, yo, Healthcare is crazy. We're. Like we know, we know. So they have. Stepped up to kind of they do have policy recommendations and they've got a robust environment of resources. It's just like nurses just don't know about it and it's really that environment really isn't for nurses. I think there could be a space for like clinical directors and people that are. Kind of managing policy and procedure, but I wanted to create something that was for nurses that that you could come to our platform, whether it's training or it's a live event or you're reading the textbook or you're watching the videos or listening to the podcast and get practical tools to help you in in your work day and. So that's really where we came up with the forward facing brand of tactical scrubs. And that was that. That was that really we we came up with a character brand like a pirate, and it came from this crazy COVID dream I had about this ship of healthcare sinking. You know, have you heard that saying where they say it's like rearranging deck furniture on the Titanic? So in the ICU, when we're trying to save someone, that's like clearly going to die, like we're doing everything we can, but they're not going to make it usually. And we're titrating all the pressers and we're starting dialysis and we're doing like we say, we're rearranging deck furniture on the Titanic. And so I had this dream about healthcare. This like sinking. And then only people that were left were the nurses. I mean, we didn't have translators. We didn't have lab people during. I mean, there was nobody in the hospital, but the nurses and some anesthesiologists and a few physicians that usually stood outside the room. And so I said, it's like they sunk. And then now we're back. And we're like zombies on this. Crazy pirate ship. So it's like, so I told my brother, who's a tattoo artist. I have two biological brothers and they both are entrepreneurs. One's a music producer and one has a really successful tattoo shop and I said draw me a zombie COVID nurse and he's like alright, I got you, you know? And so he drew it, but it was really beautiful because he put the mask was like deteriorate tearing away and. They they has like a gold tooth, like an amaj to cortex gold. And I I don't know. It's this pirate character. And then we developed a whole line of, like, pirate patches. And as they go through their training, they can get a patch. So everybody knows that they're, you know, level 2, or are you level one. And if you're level one, we need to get you out of the room and get some level 2. In here for safe safety and if your security you have. A black patch. Then then from the security arm we built out the K9 division. So now we're putting canines and officers in schools and healthcare systems, and it's just it's been so fun. Like it truly has been such a great ride.
Beth Quaas
Well, and you can just hear it in your voice. How excited you are and this is, it seems to be your passion to do this and to take care of people and not just our patients anymore. You want to take care of your. Colleagues and your coworkers.
Mel Cortez
Yeah, I think that was a hard transition and I think for any nurse that's thinking about like do I leave the bedside to do something else, the first thing I say is if you have any type of experience and you feel like you have any love for the profession, please at least try to stay PRN or take a travel local travel position and float through different hospitals like. Find a way, because we do need good leaders and we do need nurses to take care of these patients like we can't all just leave.
Beth Quaas
Right.
Mel Cortez
And for those that want to let. You know, I was able to build a successful business while working full time and I'm like a single mom of three boys. So for people that are like, ohh, that's too I can't do it. You can do it. You just have to find the. Thing that you want to do.
Beth Quaas
Yeah, that's incredible. What do you think is one thing that you would tell nurses that they can do? Right now, today, to keep themselves safe.
Mel Cortez
I would say to establish distance with your patient, so this is this is one of the techniques that we teach is so if you go in the room and just like you're assessing if the patient's alive, right, you're looking at color, you're you're assessing mental status. Ask them a question and you can start with something as easy as if they. Call you in the room, you say? How can I help you if that patient can give you a clear directive about what they want and what they need, they're considered a negotiable patient and you should step forward to provide care if you want to provide, you know, a comforting hand on the arm, you know, whatever you need to do. If the patient for any reason is already argumentative already raising their voice, maybe they're rolling their eyes. That's something that we see every day that we don't think is a behavioral anomaly, but unless you're a 14 year old girl, rolling your eyes at me is not something you should be doing. They do not see you as an authority figure, so there's a line. That they're willing to cross. And maybe they do have a psych diagnosis. Maybe they are a substance abuse user and they're not getting as much pain medication as they're able to give themselves at home. So, like, there may be clinical indications for this and we're remembering. We're treating the patient behind the behavior, right. So one of the things you can do is like maybe ask him, Sir, can I see your arm? And I just need to verify that you're and ask them for their arm. Don't just automatically reach over and grab their arm if you've never seen touch. This patient been near this patient. And then if they're gonna extend their arm, they're probably willing to cooperate with you. If they don't, they put the blanket over their head. Blah, blah. You may even want to consider at this point going to get a second person just to be in there with you as not only your witness, but also lots of people aren't going to perpetrate violence if they know two people are in the room. Because they're and they don't. Want anybody to see them acting that way? You know, and so you've just avoided a situation altogether and now you know about your patient and it's hard for nurses because you're like, OK Mel, you teach me this. How do I document that? How do I say that I saw something? Well, you can say that per the training I've received or per track training or per, you know, my.
Beth Quaas
That's great.
Mel Cortez
Educational whatever you want to say, I identified behavioral anomalies is what they're. And any court, any judge, any time that you're going to go to deposition and they want to bring in an expert in security or situational winners, they're going to know what a behavioral anomaly is. Police officers know that terminology, so they'll say, OK, that nurse saw something that made her think maybe she she wasn't safe. And then from that point, if the patient throws themselves out of bed and now they're on the floor and you're like, oh, no, now it's my fault for a fault. No, my patient showed behavioral anomalies earlier. And I thought that it wasn't safe for me to provide care because ultimately, under your nursing license, if you have more than one patient, you're responsible for those other patients, even if this patient. Hurts you. So you're using nursing judgment per your license and the Board of Nursing. If you didn't feel physically, mentally and emotionally prepared to provide care for that patient then, and you do, it can be considered malpractice. So that's in the state board board documents and you can refer to that. So and there's a great resource, Miss Maggie Ortiz, that does this all day long.
Beth Quaas
She's coming on. She's going to be a guest. She's already been a guest. And she we're meeting again this week. So she's coming back.
Mel Cortez
I love it. Becky is so cool and I always reference Maggie, so I like I said, protect yourself first. Protect your license. Next, so that's that's what we preach. And I think that just distancing the patient, asking them to hand you a towel, you want to check if a family member is kind of sketchy. Tell them that you come in with your hands full and ask them to help you. And if they get up and help you, they're going to be compliant and trust you. If they don't and they're like, well, isn't that your job? Is that what we pay you for? That person definitely could be a perpetrator of some sort of violence. Definitely verbal violence. Which ultimately can escalate very quickly and the most dangerous negotiation is the one you didn't know you were in, right? So the person has a gun in their purse, and you were the nurse that just decided to tell them how they should speak to someone. You know, you shouldn't talk to me that way. They don't care. They they're. You're not their Mama. And like as much as you want to. Tell people off. It's not even worth your time. And then that person that next person could could really have a weapon now these days. And there's so many things that are going on that we need to be prepared for and use our professionalism to protect us. You were the nurse that tactfully negotiated with them and tactfully spoke to them, and the likelihood of you becoming a victim is is lower too when they.
Beth Quaas
Come back. That is such good information. I can't even believe how much you've helped just in this little bit of time for those that are going to listen to this and. Those little they seem like little tips because we're just talking about them here and it rolls off of your tongue so easily and you just understand what you're doing. And so I hope anybody listening can take those back to their workplace and institute them today because the it's not hard. You just have to know.
Mel Cortez
It's not hard. That's what I tell you at the end of my class. You're gonna leave my class, and you're gonna know exactly what to do and what not to do when you even a 2 hour session. Yeah. When you walk into that room, it's going to change the way that you see your patient. And I do it from a very, like, uplifting. Like, we can save our profession type of way. Like it's not. A. What could you have done differently? You know, out on the street as a cop? Man, you know like.
Beth Quaas
When those things happen and the nurses brought in and they're asked, what could you have done differently? You know what? Don't blame me, don't don't blame me. The nurse I was just there providing care. And I think you're going to open a lot of eyes to that.
Speaker
OK.
Mel Cortez
Yeah. And a lot of the police and security directors, they the one of the things that they've told me is I like hearing your perspective of what you're saying because like, like, even up to not using the word deescalation anymore, because I think it places blame on the the nurse for having an emotional response to someone calling me a racial slur. Or the patient for having a psych disorder or a disease that they can't control. An addiction from the opioid crisis that wasn't even their fault. You know, like that, that type of. Mentality of who do we have to deescalate? No. Like we're humans in a human experience, and we're both in pain and we're both hurting in the same ways. You know? So how do we reconnect with each other? And there's a quote that I heard in the very beginning when I started looking up, like security. And it's stuck with me and I think. Everything that I do is kind of I come back to this core. Point that security is not the absence of threat, but the presence of connection.
Beth Quaas
Oh, I love that.
Mel Cortez
If you can reconnect then that's why, like on the nonprofit side of our division, we're doing a training center out here for veterans. We take them as they come in, out of the military, we train them to be either SRO, school resource officers or these tactical healthcare reps. Like security in a hospital. And we pay them really good. They even have canine qualifications if they need it. So it's a great program that that I'm really excited about, but. We realized that we would need kinder kids in these schools too, like in in order to stop the violence. So why not use the training center as a way to not only simulate training in schools and healthcare systems by building them out that way and outfitting them with tech partners and cameras and whatever else do the ads that they're. That an an administrator will want to see. Being able to put kids in the environment in the afternoons after school and do an athletic training program do do. Things that are beneficial for the community but also allowing the guys to have that experience that need the experience around Pediatrics or around youth and being able to help them simulate that during their training portion. There we have an MMA program. That we're we're running to teach safer ground techniques. We know that pressure points and these painful techniques have been used in the past, but you watch a Brazilian jujitsu fight and you've got some guys holding on to each other and no one's, you know, killing each other. No one's dislocating shoulders. Nobody's, and they're they're really strong.
Beth Quaas
They're really scary.
Mel Cortez
So if they can do it. Why can't we and what can skills? Can they teach us from their years, hundreds and years of study, thousands of years of martial art? What's what? Can that give us not only for for emotional regulation, but also in regards of physical fitness and controlling your mind and your emotions, and being able to tactfully? Help someone when they need.
Beth Quaas
Well, I the next place I would like to see your training go is into the schools, into the nursing schools. So they're getting that as students and. Have it have those tools right from the get go.
Mel Cortez
Yeah, the the textbook model is is really what we like to do is train educators like before they go back to school and then they can take the lessons and the training that we provide in the lecture manuals and build it into their own curriculum. So for the next four years or whatever your nursing school. Two years. Then you can learn that if you're in residency as a doctor, you're learning it and they're coming out learning the doctor portion of what they need to know so that when we get together and a new nurse and a new Doctor doesn't matter, they both know CPR. They both know tacked, and everybody's kind of on the same page. And we end the problem instead of. Trying to work on the legislation and like, and I'm grateful for nurses who are doing legislation work, but that's like too little, too late. You know, we've already been assaulted, like it's already happening. So what about all the nurses that it's happening to right now? Today? What are we doing for them?
Beth Quaas
Yeah, I love that. So for nurses that are listening or anyone in healthcare really. If they go to their managers, their their charged nurses, their cnos who? Who were they telling them to contact to get your? To get your training in their hospitals.
Mel Cortez
Yeah, they can call, they can. Go on LinkedIn and find me Mel Cortez and a lot of your nurse managers and managers are already following me. They know they know me and so or the security directors. Definitely. If you if you're a nurse in your hospital and you are concerned about your safety. Ask the security officer on duty who their director is, ask who their boss is, go to their boss. Their boss can be able to find me through their local International Association of Healthcare Safety and Security, and we can come out and provide training or a demo. And sometimes when clinical is moving really slow. Security can move a little bit faster, so that's one way. Also, we will be going on tour, launching a tour, so we're hoping to come to, you know, major cities around and organizations will be able to get that basic level of training in a 2 hour session and then we'll be demoing some of the other things that we're doing like the K9 and the product and. Some really neat stuff that's coming out in in 2024. So we are available and we can train an entire hospital for $25,000 or less. Wow. Just to give you an idea, an Impella device that goes in, in the Cath lab is $30,000. So it's cheaper than that. I know many organizations are used to playing, paying millions for workplace violence training, and we've done away with that. Model and we don't have licensing fees, so a lot of times our training can actually fall under the cost of operations. So they don't even need to ask get a permission for funding.
Beth Quaas
That's incredible. I I hope you just continue to grow and train more and more people. And I think what you. Doing is absolutely incredible, so thank you.
Mel Cortez
Thank you. I appreciate it. You know, I think it it just takes. Somebody to have an idea at the right time and executed the right way and I was always told no. So and I have oppositional defiance to sort, so it's actually quite motivating.
Beth Quaas
Well, thankfully for us, you do. So thank you for that.
Speaker
I'm a nice you nurse.
Mel Cortez
You told me what? OK.
Beth Quaas
Mel, I so appreciate you coming on and teaching us a lot in this little bit of time, but beyond that, people are going to be able to find you and bring you in and your training and hopefully we. And get to a much safer place for our nurses.
Mel Cortez
Yeah, I'm happy to do guest lectures anytime or guest zoom, even if it's like, you know, you get all your charge nurses together and we have a one hour zoom. There's lots of things that that I'm able to do and I'm always available for free consults to my any nursing CEO's or nursing. Managers they can get on LinkedIn message me and I will always consult nurses for free.
Beth Quaas
Fantastic. And we will put all the information in the show notes as well so that they can find you easily and. Again, I thank you. I thank you for everything you're doing and thanks for taking the time to come on the show today.
Mel Cortez
Thank you so much. This has been wonderful and I am so happy for everything that you're doing to give. Give us a voice and I think we need, we need the space.
Beth Quaas
Absolutely. Well, thanks again, Mel. And we will be hearing a lot more from you.