What I Do - Emily Vaughn, DNP
I am a pediatric nurse practitioner. Technically, I’m a family nurse practitioner, but I’ve always done pediatrics. I have kind of a unique role at the NIH Clinical Center. I support the care of pediatric patients enrolled on clinical research protocols, and I spend much of my time working with the Clinical Center’s pediatric hospital medicine team. I really love it. Every pediatric patient that gets admitted to the hospital for a clinical research trial is followed by a pediatrician and a provider like myself. We work with all the different NIH institutes and help co-manage their patients. Many patients here are complex and have rare diseases. They rely on the NIH for their care because there are not a lot of experts that know about their diseases.
I serve on the Pediatric Pharmacy and Therapeutics Subcommittee and participate in the clinical center’s review of STAT antibiotic use, in efforts to maximize and streamline delivery of care. I’ve also had the opportunity to support research led by Dr. Deborah Merke in the area of congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH). It’s a rare disease of the adrenal gland, and Dr. Merke is one of the world’s leading experts. The treatment is steroids, which are life saving for these patients, but they don’t come without risks. If you’re on steroids for a long time, they can affect your bones, weight and metabolism.
I feel so lucky to be part of something that helps people who wouldn’t otherwise receive that kind of care. I love the patients. They’ve had such different life experience than your average healthy child and have such unique perspectives. They just all happen to be so smart in addition to having their rare disease. They start to learn all the lingo about medicine. It can be a little bit sad. But it can also be rewarding when they learn and understand and say they want to be a nurse or doctor someday. They make everything worth it.