Bonnie Woods, BSN-MA-LNC has been in the nursing field for more than 30 years, starting in as a staff float nurse medical and surgical units, intensive care, well baby clinics – that is, until she floated into mental health. That was in the early 1980s, and Woods decided to stay put.
“I decided to try mental health because actually you really interact with patients who have mental health problems in any specialty that you work,” Woods said. “And also just in society, you meet people with certain diagnoses or undiagnosed behaviors, so I thought that I would try a new specialty.”
Insurance parity is where Woods says she has noticed the most significant change in the last three decades of mental health inpatient care.
“Parity says that mental health patients have to receive the same benefits as a patient with any other condition, so it used to be that mental health patients only had a certain number of days they could be hospitalized or a number of visits they could be seen as an outpatient,” Woods said. “They were much more reduced than a patient that, say, had congestive heart failure or diabetes or a stroke. Well, that’s changed over the years now that it’s an equal playing field.”
Another change Woods has witnessed over the years is similar to what has occurred on the medical side.
“Patients are not allowed to stay within inpatient hospitals as long as they used to,” Woods said. “When I first started in mental health, patients could stay up to 30 days.”
Woods said back then, the average stay was around 21 days or three weeks.
“Now the average length of stay is – stretch it out 10 days – that’s it,” she added.
As a Clinical Manager of in-Patient Psychiatry at BJC Health Care at Barnes-Jewish Hospital, Woods manages three areas of behavioral health at the main hospital campus, adult, geriatric and ECT, the electric convulsive therapy unit. Previously at BJC, Woods managed the partial psychiatric program, chemical dependency inpatient and outpatient services.
She was an adjunct professor for two years at Goldfarb School of Nursing at BJC and the Chamberlain School of Nursing (formerly the Deaconess School of Nursing, now owned by DeVry).
Woods is a 1972 graduate of Soldan High School in St. Louis. She earned a legal nurse consultant certificate from St. Louis Community College, a certificate in health care informatics from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, and is working on a certificate in health care reform from Washington University in St. Louis. Woods earned and a bachelor of science in nursing and a master of arts in health service management from Webster University.
Woods is a member of the American Nurses Association and the American Psychiatric Nursing Association. She also belongs to Chi Eta Phi, an international professional nursing sorority.
Her family includes a son, two grandchildren, and two brothers and sisters. She is a member of Metropolitan Baptist Church in Jennings.
From staff coaching and support; coordinating patient record compliance, safe patient care to reduce restraints, assaults and injuries; or facilitating stress management sessions at community health fairs, Woods finds mental health nursing a rewarding career. Although she says in the St. Louis area, the number of nurses working in the field is small.
“When you are in need to hire a mental health nurse, often, especially over the last couple of years, there aren’t any experienced nurses out there because everyone is working or retired,” Woods said. “Therefore we default to hiring new graduate nurses who have an interest in mental health nursing, and then we mentor, coach and train them to be mental health providers.”
Woods owes her work in this area to former manager, Helen Russell Williams at BJC, who encouraged her to consider the nurse management track.
“I had a manager who thought I would be good in management/administrative field,” Woods said. “The reason I chose health services management is because if you go down the clinical track, a graduate program for nursing at the time in 1992 when I started, at that time, those programs didn’t teach you a lot on management and on finance and on health care policies, and that’s where my interest had grown.”
Woods furthered her education in order to understand the business of health care.
She said, “In order to be more versed in the administrative and the policy decision-making those avenues, I chose the graduate degree in health service management.”
