Bethany Duyser, NP is the assistant director at IMPART Alliance, a position she’s held since 2023. She received her Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) degree from the College of Nursing at Michigan State University in 2022. In addition to her DNP, Duyser holds a Bachelor of Science in Nursing from the University of Cincinnati and a Master of Science in Nursing from the University of Illinois Chicago.
Duyser started with IMPART Alliance as a graduate student in 2021. Since joining, she has led efforts to educate and train direct-care workers. Her expertise spans numerous settings, including time spent as a nurse practitioner where she provided long-term care for older adults.
While working as a nurse early in her career, Duyser noticed how nursing was focused intensely on acute care, or care that takes place in the ICU and emergency room. Duyser saw herself working in a hospital for her entire career. “The 22-year-old version of me would be like, ‘home-and-community-based, long-term care for non-nurses? How did you fall from grace so precipitously?’” she said, laughing. “But my whole life has led me to this.”
“It’s an often-overlooked role, I think, in the field,” Duyser said on the IMPART Alliance podcast. “It was a tough lesson for me being a nurse. I had this one perspective on how health care should be delivered after years of nursing school. Then I started working around here and I realized that it had really shaped my perspective on direct-care work. And it’s been really useful to see how every profession can perceive other ones differently and to make sure that our collaboration isn’t reduced to delegation or supervision, but truly understanding everyone’s competencies, what overlaps, what differs, and how to best utilize someone else’s expertise.”
Her passion and commitment to direct-care work stems from a night working at the ICU. She was sitting with an older patient with weight loss to encourage them to engage in conversation and an ice cream breakfast when the charge nurse told her to do some “real nursing work.” She left the hospital, determined, to pursue advanced practice nursing focused on older adults, working mostly in long-term care facilities.
From there, Duyser saw the importance of direct-care work and how the workers are often excluded from decision making in healthcare. “If you told someone they could only have one person take care of them, they will pick the direct-care worker every time,” Duyser said. She mentioned how direct-care work was devalued and treated as though it is subordinate to nursing and medical care.
Duyser’s commitment to IMPART Alliance is rooted in her recognition that job quality has a substantial impact on care quality. At IMPART Alliance, she aims to enhance inclusion of direct-care workers in the healthcare team; recognized for their expertise and judgment as independent professionals.