Meet Katherine Alvarado, a 2016 Alternate Entry Master of Science in Nursing (AE-MSN) graduate currently working as part of the Maternal Transport team on the Labor and Delivery unit at Ascension Seton Medical Center in Austin. This experienced team of labor nurses deploy via ambulance, or Starflight, to health care facilities that do not provide a suitable level of maternal/fetal care or, in some cases, do not provide obstetric care at all.
Katherine started her career as a Labor and Delivery nurse in High-Risk Obstetrics at St. David’s North Austin Hospital. Not long after starting her position, Ms. Alvarado was assigned to precept a Capstone nursing student. “I felt unsure that I was ready to teach, but I decided to dive in and taught my student everything I knew. We shared many first-time experiences, such as our first nurse-only delivery of a baby who just couldn’t wait for the doctor.” It was then that Katherine realized she loved teaching, especially when it directly contributed to the optimal care of Texas women. By the end of the year, Ms. Alvarado accepted a position as a Clinical Teaching Assistant for the UT Austin School of Nursing’s BSN program. “I spent a few semesters broadening my obstetric and labor skills while coming in to the UT Austin School of Nursing on my days off to educate students.” Katherine spent the next 4 years learning and rotating through multiple areas such as: obstetrical triage, labor, Operating Room (OR), Post-anesthesia Care Unit (PACU), Antepartum, Postpartum and Maternal-Fetal Medicine. Eventually, she went on to obtain specialty certifications in Inpatient Obstetric Nursing and electronic fetal monitoring.
At the end of 2020, like many nurses who worked during the pandemic, Ms. Alvarado decided she needed a change to prevent burning out completely. “As a float pool perinatal nurse, I got the opportunity to work in many L&D units around Central Texas and broadened my understanding of the different health care barriers and needs patients experienced by geographic areas.” This insight would prove useful as Katherine accepted a position as an Obstetrics (OB) Case Manager with Ascension Seton Maternal-Fetal Medicine. She worked in partnership with a variety of specialists to follow high risk pregnancies with both maternal and fetal complications. As part of this interdisciplinary team, Katherine worked to develop comprehensive plans of care through pregnancy, delivery, and postpartum visits, in addition to spending a majority of her time finding solutions for patient barriers to health care and providing patient education.
Throughout these transitions, the call to be a Labor and Delivery nurse never relented and Katherine accepted her current position as a Maternal Transport nurse at Seton Medical Center. “My time at the UT Austin School of Nursing paved the way for me to experience multiple dream jobs and provided me with amazing women teachers and role models that I still reference to this day. I am working to truly make a difference in women’s health!”
We honor Nurse Katherine Alvarado for working to improve maternal health in Texas while addressing the everyday struggles of patient access to quality health care.