2018 Gold Medalist – Clinical Education

Dora Kuntz, MS, RN-BC, Clinical Educator for Adult Patient Care Services, The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston

“You hear it all the time. I became a nurse because I wanted to help people,” says Dora Kuntz, who has practiced nursing for 14 years. “When I was 19, my daughter Taylor was born with spina bifida. At the same time my dad was diagnosed with heart failure. When Taylor was four years old, I entered nursing school so that she and my other children could have a better life.”

Dora received her BSN at the University of Tennessee at Martin in 2004 and accepted a position at The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston on the telemetry floor. “So we packed up our four kids and moved to Texas,” she says.

A year later, at the end of 2004, her father had open-heart surgery and she moved back home to help. “At the end of that year I was on the phone asking to come back to UTMB,” she says. She returned to Galveston in December 2005.

After Hurricane Ike in 2007, she moved to the research department, where she worked the night shift. After she divorced, she accepted a faculty position at the UTMB School of Nursing so that her teenage daughters wouldn’t have to stay home alone at night.

“I absolutely love students – love, love, love them – but I found I missed the clinical component of working with patients in the hospital,” she says. In April of 2015, she moved back to the hospital as a clinical educator, a role in which she “gets to do a little of whatever is needed.”

Dora says she learned to advocate for patients after advocating for her father and her daughter. “When Taylor was growing up, we were always pushing for her to be in the classroom with other kids,” she says. “We advocated for her to get up and walk and ride the bus to school. Because of her physical disability, people assumed she had a mental disability. She graduated from Clear Lake High School with 900 other students and walked across the stage with her crutches. She’s 24 now and lives a normal life, which is awesome. She continues to inspire me, along with my other kids, who are just as independent.”

Dora’s nominator, Odette Comeau, DNP, RN, CNS, CCRN wrote of her: “Dora has a very strong work ethic. While her primary duties are during day shift hours, she routinely comes in to work at night to touch base with night shift staff. She stayed at the medical center during Hurricane Harvey to provide support for staff during the storm and its aftermath. Several years ago, she revised a competency orientation check-off tool to one that was evidence-based and fully electronic. It was so popular that it was adopted by all nursing departments hospital wide. Her ability to translate complex topics into easy-to-understand and practical information is part of what makes Dora successful as an educator.”

When she discovered opportunities for improvement in mobilizing patients to prevent the complications of immobility, Dora developed a nursing orientation program to change the culture of patient mobility at the hospital. In addition to fulltime employment as a clinical educator in a demanding academic medical center, she serves as adjunct clinical faculty in the UTMB School of Nursing.

“I’m completely motivated by watching people grow,” Dora says. “I thrive on seeing other people achieve what they want to achieve, especially when someone tells them they can’t do it. It’s wonderful when nurses and students have that ‘aha!’ moment that sparks unexpected solutions that allow them to thrive.”

A Good Samaritan Foundation Bronze Award Winner in 2015 and 2016, Dora volunteers as a sexual health education teacher for local 5th graders. Her contribution has grown from teaching one class to multiple classes, and has been expanded to include 7th graders and a Breakfast with Mentors. “It’s amazing the things I get to do as a nurse!” she says.

In her spare time Dora loves to travel. “I used to drop my girls off with my mother in Indiana for the summer. When I came to pick them up at the end of the summer, I’d ask where they wanted to go. On one trip we drove from Indiana to South Dakota to Wyoming to Montana, and ended up in LA. So my kids are not afraid to step outside the bounds and do new things.”

Neither is Dora, who is currently in the Doctoral program at Texas Woman’s University. “I’m open to wherever God wants to take me and that has probably been my biggest factor in making choices,” she says. “God knows when I feel comfortable and always says, ‘Hey, Dora! It’s time to push yourself outside your comfort zone.”