Nacole Riccaboni
Acute Care Nurse Practitioner, Podcast Host, & DNP Student
Nacole was born and raised in Kissimmee, Florida and has lived in the Central Florida area her whole life. Nursing became a dream of hers after she, her mother, and brother arrived in the emergency department after a drunk-driving accident when she was 12 years old. Despite the circumstances her nurse, named Ms. Green, made Nacole feel safe and cared for, and she decided she also wanted to be there for others. “I never forgot how much she cared for me and that event was a motivating factor in me wanting to become a nurse.”
After she was laid off from her position in the equipment rental field, she decided to finally “go for it” and worked to shift her mindset to achieve daily micro-goals that she credits with helping her get through nursing school.
Bigger goals overwhelmed me as a teenager, so I reprogrammed my mind to only focus on smaller moves and tinier bits. When I started nursing school, the idea of being a nurse was out of this world. Why did I think I deserved to be a nurse? Could I do this? Am I even smart enough to do this? The anxiety would wash over me, and it would make me want to give up.
Nacole obtained her Associates Degree in Nursing in 2009 while also working as a patient care technician during school. To document her nursing school experience, she began the Nurse Nacole blog and the Nurse Nacole YouTube channel which has had over two million total views.
As a nursing student, I figured I’d fail and rather spectacularly. I was terrible at math and wasn’t a good student (academically) in high school. I just thought I’d track my journey in video form as a way to look back and reflect. Not sure why someone would want to look back on a possible failure in their life, but that’s me for you, haha… Each week or so, I’d go into my bathroom and record my nursing school journey. I didn’t know how the journey would end up, but I knew I wanted to track it in some way (perhaps out of curiosity of the unknown).
Nacole’s first role as nurse was on a medical-surgical floor where she was responsible for six patients per shift. After her husband suffered a heart attack and needed a quadruple coronary artery bypass graft, the experience changed their lives and inspired her passion to apply for positions as a critical care nurse. Though she ended up spending seven years in her first ICU role, it was a transition from her experience on a medical surgical unit:
I was overwhelmed! And by overwhelmed, I mean I was crying in the bathroom at work on a few occasions. It was an entirely different ball game. Luckily, I didn’t give up, and I got into a groove after six months.
The experience of a heart attack at a young age also led her family towards a path of preventative health and lifestyle modifications that resulted in Nacole’s gastric bypass in 2015. After losing 160 pounds, she reports that she and her husband are both healthier now than they were in their 20s. To obtain access to nursing leadership positions, Nacole finished her Bachelor’s of Nursing from Florida Hospital College and received her Master’s of Nursing from the University of South Alabama to become a dual board-certified Adult-Gerontology Acute Care Nurse Practitioner Certification (AGACNP-BC) and Family Nurse Practitioner Certification (FNP-BC) in 2018. In 2020 she completed her Master’s of Business online from Capella University to gain more knowledge about the business side of healthcare, and she is currently pursuing an Executive Track Doctorate of Nursing Practice from the University of Central Florida.
I want people to feel support in their weakest moment. Life is unpredictable, and in those moments in the hospital, we all deserve someone who understands our fragility and assists us throughout the entire physiological and emotional healing process.
Professionally Nacole rarely has a dull moment — she began working as an adjunct professor for Herzing University in 2018 and started as a multi-system critical care nurse practitioner for Orlando Hospital in 2019 where she has been a frontline provider through multiple COVID-19 surges. She is also a contracted nurse for the Keener Self-Care Nursing App and an affiliated partner for several brands. After creating her own podcast in 2018, she became the host of SHIFT Talk Podcast in 2020, where she speaks with nurses on topics like health equity, burnout, PTSD, professional development, and, of course, COVID-19. Nacole has recently applied for a nurse practitioner psychiatric mental health certificate program at the University of Miami and one day wants to open a community clinic.
View Nacole’s Nurses You Should Know Video here.
Listen to Nacole’s interview with Elizabeth Scala (also a RN MBA) here.
Read Nacole’s articles on putting yourself before your patients, piercing and tattoos in nursing, and how she navigates her career and social media.
Sources
The information above was sourced from Nacole Riccaboni and LinkedIn.
Learn More
To learn more about inclusion in nursing and be part of the national discussion to address racism in nursing, check out and share the following resources:
Know Your History
- Nursing CLIO to engage with historians and scholars committed to deep work around historical accuracy in healthcare and nursing.
- American Association for the History of Nursing to attend monthly webinars on topics of nursing history, view the calendar here.
Examine Bias
- NurseManifest offers live zoom sessions with fellow nurses on nursing’s overdue reckoning on racism and a page to sign their pledge.
- Breaking Bias in Healthcare is an online course created by scientist Anu Gupta, to learn how bias is related to our brain’s neurobiology and can be mitigated with mindfulness.
- Revolutionary Love Learning Hub provides free tools for learners and educators to use love as fuel towards ourselves, our opponents, and to others so that we can embody a world where we see no strangers.
Support & Advocate
- Critical Conversation on Health Equity and Racism Toolkit from the American Academy of Nursing
- National Coalition for Ethnic Minority Nurse Association to stay engaged with topics relevant to nurses of color.
Help us paint the internet with nursing’s diverse origin stories. Follow this Medium publication, NursesYouShouldKnow on Instagram, LinkedIn, or Facebook, or @KnowNurses on Twitter to share and re-post our articles far and wide.
