I started the podcast…
…to connect to my asynchronous nurse practitioner students at The Catholic University of America’s Conway School of Nursing. I wanted to help them synthesize their didactic content, while still providing the freedom of work-life balance while in graduate school. Pediatric nurse practitioners (PNPs) were under-represented in the podcast arena, and I couldn’t find any podcasts directed at the application of management principles for PNPs in their clinical practice, so I decided to create my own. And The Peds NP was born…
The goal of The Peds NP podcast is to provide practical guidance from the evidence in the literature to everyday problems. As we discuss both primary and acute care pediatrics, you’ll hear me repeat phrases like, “Take it back to the patho[physiology],” and, “Remember the acute care differential.”
Becky Carson, DNP, APRN, CPNP-PC/AC
I was born and raised in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I've spent over a decade as a PNP in acute care settings all across the East coast and Midwest, and traveled the globe in search of new cultures and sick kids. Experiences in resource-limited settings informed my practice in emergency medicine and gave me an interest in resource utilization. My passion for evidence-based medicine was born from the application of medical decision making based on history and physical exam in remote African clinics that had no reliable laboratory diagnostics. Why should I order tests that have no prognostic value and simply cost the family precious disposable income? When is the acute care differential so great a risk that we need to pursue diagnostics? From these dilemmas, my style as a minimalist provider helped me prioritize the clinical presentation, consider risk in the acute care differential, and offer objective, quantifiable return criteria to families that take into account the progression of disease.
My favorite stop on my life journey was in Washington D.C. It was there that I poured over acute care pediatrics and my doctoral studies, met some brilliant students at the Catholic University of America that inspired me to follow a dream of becoming faculty, and I met my husband while watching Tar Heel basketball (although he was there for the free food). The rest is history.
After a short stint in Cincinnati, my family was lucky enough to move home to Chapel Hill, where we are raising our children next door to their grandparents. Life in academia with small children looks different from my years as an international adventurer, but we still enjoy hiking locally, down town bike rides, outdoor beverages on porches and patios, and gardening. In my spare time, I have a podcast.