by Tom Wilemon
Heather Jackson, MSN, RN, APRN, has been promoted to administrative director of Advanced Practice for Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center (VICC).
“We are very pleased to welcome Heather to the cancer PCC leadership team. Heather brings to us significant experience in APP practice and professional development,” said Anna Rodriguez, MSN, MHA, OCN, associate nursing officer of VICC.
“Heather will continue to strengthen our onboarding and training programs to ensure our APPs are well prepared and well equipped in the delivery of high-quality oncology clinical care. In addition, Heather will focus on optimizing APP roles and integration in our interdisciplinary care models in collaboration with provider and cancer PCC leadership.”
Jackson has served in different capacities at Vanderbilt University Medical Center since August 2006 when she started with Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt as a nurse in the neonatal intensive care unit.
As a practitioner, she cared for pediatric trauma and surgery patients before joining the Vanderbilt Interventional Pain Clinic at One Hundred Oaks. Most recently, she was director for Advanced Practice for Outpatient Neuroscience, Orthopaedics and Surgery.
In her new role, she will lead advanced practice providers at VICC. Currently a Medical University of South Carolina PhD candidate, Jackson said she looks forward to pursuing research opportunities at VICC and encouraging other advanced practice providers and nurses to do so as well.
“One of the goals I have is to promote our advance practice providers and assist them in highlighting their accomplishments within VUMC as well as nationally by writing abstracts, creating posters and submitting for conferences,” Jackson said. “I’m really excited to be part of the team at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center.”
In becoming a nurse, she followed in her mother’s footsteps, a mother who always knew what to do whenever Jackson was sick as a child.
“My mom was an LPN,” Jackson said. “I was always interested in health. I thought ‘One day, I want to be a mom, and I don’t ever want to be in a situation where I don’t know what to do for my family.’ That’s what always intrigued me. I kept going from there.”
She is the mother of two boys, ages 7 and 5.
