Jeni Fitzpatrick comes by nursing honestly.
Her grandmother was a nurse, and Fitzpatrick has been an R.N. for 21 years. She’s still an R.N. and is now teaching the profession she loves to Augusta University/University of Georgia Medical Partnership students.
“I feel like this was made for me,” she said. “It has a leadership component, and I get to work with students, which I absolutely love.”
After hearing about how her grandmother cared for patients, she decided to take a health sciences internship class in high school.
“At that time, I thought I wanted to be a doctor,” she said. “Then I got to watch a birth as part of the class and saw what the nurses were doing and thought, ‘Oh, that’s what I want to do.’ I liked how much time they got to spend with the patient to build that trust.”
She earned a bachelor’s degree and later a master’s degree in nursing and worked as a labor and delivery nurse and unit manager for several years. She also became a certified sexual assault nurse examiner and forensics nurse and later worked as a legal nurse consultant, testifying as an expert witness in obstetrical malpractice cases.
When Fitzpatrick and her family moved to Oconee County in 2020 after falling in love with the area during a Southern road trip, she began working in labor and delivery in Atlanta’s Northside Hospital System. Eventually she was ready to do something different — and give up her commute to Atlanta — and began looking at what UGA had to offer. She’s been in her role as the medical partnership’s nurse/teaching clinic operations manager for more than three years.
“This was a brand-new role, so there was a lot of opportunity for me to help shape and grow the position,” she said. “I love it here. I love working for UGA.”
In her role, Fitzpatrick manages 14 mobile clinics and a school-based health center in Clarke County providing free care. In fact, the Athens Free Clinic recently surpassed the milestone of delivering more than $1 million of health care since its opening in 2018. She supports the clinics’ 14 physicians and the 120 medical students who work with them gaining experience.
On a typical day, she’s following up with patients, answering questions and taking care of administrative duties. The clinics are important for the medical students because they bring together all of the skills they’ve learned while giving back to the community.
“I love getting to be a part of all of the amazing teamwork that happens here and watching medical students go from that first day when they’re really nervous to watching them progress and build their knowledge,” she said. “One of my goals is to show them what interdisciplinary teamwork really looks like and how, as a nurse, there’s a lot that I can contribute. I get to expose them to nursing before they even go out into the clinical world.”
Fitzpatrick gets be in the classroom with those students herself. She teaches a patient experience lecture and a procedural skills class that includes lessons like starting an IV, placing a nasogastric tube and even phlebotomy.
“I love interacting with students,” she said. “I get to teach them some of my nursing tricks with those skills and help them to be in a place where they feel excited about using those skills and more empowered and less nervous when they get out there into the real world.”
Fitzpatrick also built a volunteer program for about 30 pre-health undergraduate students that offers administrative support for those mobile clinics. She does extensive training with them, teaching them about HIPAA, scheduling and how to properly handle electronic medical records.
“We wanted the medical students to be able to focus on learning the art of doctoring and not have to worry about registering a patient and those kinds of tasks,” she said. “These volunteers get to go out and be a part of the team with our medical students and physicians. It’s an incredible sample of the pre-health students we have here at UGA.”
Teaching is actually a huge part of the nursing profession, Fitzpatrick said, because nurses teach their patients all the time. And in her work in hospitals, Fitzpatrick helped train newer nurses. As her career continued, she decided to lean into that aspect.
“I’m proud to be a part of the process of getting to care for our community,” she said.
Fitzpatrick is continuing her own education and working on a Doctor of Philosophy in nursing with a research focus on maternal mortality.
Outside of work, Fitzpatrick spends as much time with her family, which includes her husband, two children and two dogs, as she can. They enjoy attending UGA baseball games, and Fitzpatrick also paints with watercolors. But she always carves out time to read journal articles.
“I want people to know what an important role a nurse can play in medical education and what nurses can bring to the table,” she said.
