View from the C-Suite: Preventing Nurse Burnout

March 19, 2024
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How Chief Nursing Officer Char Boulch, MSN ’20, is improving nurse retention and recruitment through wellness initiatives.   


Char Boulch, MSN ’20, started her career in healthcare at age 19 as a patient access clerk. To contribute more and follow in the footsteps of her mother and grandmother, she became a nurse.

Today, she is chief nursing officer at Saline Memorial Hospital, a 177-bed acute care facility in Benton, Arkansas, that is part of LifePoint Health. There she contributes her clinical expertise on the executive team and focuses on wellness for her team.

81% of nurses reported feeling burnout in 2022, according to a Nurse.org survey.

How CNO Char Boulch Battles Burnout 

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The Impact of Lifelong Learning on Leadership

She obtained her bachelor’s while serving as an emergency department assistant director and immediately continued to the Master of Science in Nursing program at Walden University, which is part of Adtalem Global Education. While working on her master’s she was recruited to work as an emergency department director. Upon completion of her master’s, she was promoted to assistant CNO and CNO a year later. She is currently pursuing a Doctor of Nursing Practice with a focus in executive leadership.

Walden is the No. 1 conferrer of nursing master’s degrees in the U.S.

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When you work on your bachelor’s, you learn how to care for a department just like when you work on your associates, you learn how to care for a patient. When I worked on my master’s, it was about how I care for the organization.

“I took things that I learned from Walden and used them in real-world experiences as my career was growing,” she adds. “I’ll never forget doing a work project based on finance and productivity while I was learning the same thing at Walden.”

Read more about wellness: Care Starts with You: 3 Self-Care Strategies for Nurses.

For more information, email the Adtalem Global Communications Team: adtalemmedia@adtalem.com.