Denene Prophet-Williams, MBA, MLA, Fred Hutch’s new chief nursing officer and vice president, always loved being a nurse. But it was only after a life-altering car accident landed her in the same hospital where she worked that she truly understood the impact that quality health care can have on patient outcomes.
It was 1995 and Prophet-Williams was on her way to work when a drunk driver hit her, leaving her with a fractured femur, a heart contusion (bruised heart muscle) and glass shards embedded in her face.
When she didn’t show up to work that day, her team at Memorial Hermann Health System in Houston was baffled. Prophet-Williams always arrived early for her shift on the oncology floor. Soon enough, they learned she was in the emergency department. She underwent surgery and stays in the intensive care and rehab units before being released about 30 days later.
“I have a different perspective after being a patient,” she said. “I have taken what I learned as a patient and who I want to be as a nursing leader, and allowed both of these experiences to mold me into the leader I am today.”
Prophet-Williams couldn’t work for six months because she couldn’t be on her feet for extended periods, but the accident only strengthened her commitment to nursing. Prophet-Williams decided to transition into management and secured a position as a night-shift nursing manager in charge of renal, oncology and cardiac monitoring.
“I loved the ability to help staff troubleshoot and problem solve,” she said. “It afforded me the opportunity to help teach and motivate nurses and support the well-being of our patients.”
As a nurse leader, Prophet-Williams felt called to broaden her perspectives on humanity so she pursued a two-year Master of Liberal Arts degree at Houston Christian University that taught her how to interact with the patient population on her renal oncology unit, which she described as “a melting pot and hodgepodge of cultures, of both patients and staff.”
“I needed to know more about how to relate to the people,” said Prophet-Williams, who attended school in the evenings, often napping in the car if time permitted, prior to the start of her shift at the hospital. “I focused on humanities, sociology and religion and took classes that resonated with me so that I could better support the various cultural norms and expectations of the patients we were serving,” she said.
Eventually, Prophet-Williams moved to a daytime nurse manager position at a different hospital, where she spent her days rounding on staff and patients and collaborating on projects and quality improvement initiatives, which led to another leadership role at a new Houston hospital opening a cardiovascular unit. There she developed operational policies, hired staff, trained and onboarded them — and learned a lot about the financial aspects of healthcare budget and revenue.
That experience prompted her to fortify her business acumen by pursuing a Master of Business Administration at the University of Phoenix campus in Houston. When she took a new job in a bone marrow transplant (BMT) unit at Houston Methodist’s Center for Cell and Gene Therapy, she was equipped to home in on financial pain points, helping reduce outpatient infusion write-offs of high-dollar medications by working with revenue cycle, finance and physician groups.
She also led an initiative to begin point-of-care testing for hematology patients, which slashed wait time for results from 90 minutes to 30 minutes. She noticed, for example, that the waiting room always seemed packed.
“I thought, ‘What’s the bottleneck?’ And I pinpointed that it was labs: everyone needed labs so we were able to get a rapid lab so that patients could get in and out of appointments more quickly.”
Moving to a comprehensive cancer center
Prophet-Williams also took on responsibility for Houston Methodist’s Breast Care Center and all other infusion services. Then in 2012, MD Anderson came calling. At the National Cancer Institute-designated comprehensive cancer center, which handles up to 900 BMT patients each year, she worked in areas including transplant and apheresis as well as leukemia, lymphoma, bone marrow aspiration and pediatrics.
“What attracted us to Denene is that she cut her teeth at MD Anderson in the BMT field, which is near and dear to our heart at Fred Hutch,” said Nancy Davidson, MD, executive vice president for clinical affairs and holder of the Raisbeck Endowed Chair for Collaborative Research. “Our organization was at an inflection point having recently merged two years ago. We needed a very experienced nursing professional with a broad knowledge of oncology nursing, someone who would be a servant leader interested in the challenges of a newish organization.”
Davidson said that Prophet-Williams shares the goals of the Fred Hutch executive leadership team: To see more patients while continuing to provide top-quality care in support of the organization’s research mission.
“As we are thinking about cancer care for the future, will our models evolve?” she said. “We would like to be at the vanguard of that.”
Davidson has asked Prophet-Williams to analyze the nursing organizational structure to assess if Fred Hutch is "optimally organized to provide exceptional nursing care.”
“We need to think about the relationship between nursing at South Lake Union and the community sites,” said Davidson. "We’re working to make sure we view them as integral parts of Fred Hutch writ large. They need to feel part of the team and fully integrated with South Lake Union as card-carrying, full-fledged Fred Hutch nurses.”
Building relationships with nurses at UW Medicine is also an important element of providing seamless oncology care as Fred Hutch serves as UW Medicine’s cancer program.
Prophet-Williams agrees that nurses play a critical role in improving the patient experience. “Nurses interact with the patients the most,” she said. “We advocate for patients and families, we spend time with them, we promote active listening and encourage information-sharing to help improve patient outcomes. Patients come looking for us to provide the best, high-quality care and we want to be able to give that to them."
As the need for nurses is expected to continue growing, Prophet-Williams is thinking about how to recruit both within and beyond the Puget Sound region.
“We have to look at opportunities across the country even as we seek talent in Washington state, and reach out to nursing schools to bring new leaders and new nurses to our organization,” she said.
Grooming the next generation of nurse leaders
Promoting Fred Hutch as a great place to work is an easy sell, said Prophet-Williams.
“The nursing engagement here is phenomenal,” she said. “People who work here stay here for a very long time."
To make sure that doesn’t change, Prophet-Williams said it’s also important to reach out to young people in middle school and high school to introduce them to Fred Hutch and the field of nursing as a potential career.
In her new role, Prophet-Williams intends to promote professional development, growing and grooming the next generation of nurse leaders while strengthening the relationships between providers and nurses. She also wants to support and advance diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) within the organization by promoting a diverse workforce and supporting a diverse patient population. And she thinks that technology and innovation are key to improving efficiency and enhancing patient safety, even as she underscores that the ability to roll up one’s sleeves and dive in is still paramount.
“I’m the helper,” she said. “I want to help open doors and prioritize the needs of the patient.”
After spending eight years at MD Anderson, during the heart of COVID-19, Prophet-Williams moved to Los Angeles to work for the cancer service line at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where she supervised multiple departments, including the breast center, radiation oncology, infusion, and several regional sites intended to grow and strengthen Cedars-Sinai's cancer services beyond its core region.
As she was packing for the move to Seattle, she made sure to include a tiny mouse figurine that she’d received from former Fred Hutch Chief Nursing Officer Terry McDonnell during a 2017 visit to Fred Hutch to observe best practices.
The tiny ceramic figurine was mass-produced and presented to Fred Hutch nurses during National Nurses Week in 2018. The original mouse was a gift from a patient being treated for acute myeloid leukemia to Kathleen Shannon Dorcy, PhD, RN, a nurse who worked with Fred Appelbaum, MD, executive vice president and holder of the Metcalfe Family/Frederick Appelbaum Endowed Chair in Cancer Research, on his clinical trial involving mouse models. The mouse was intended to symbolize hope for patients with leukemia.
“The mouse represents the importance of thinking differently about how to treat cancer,” said Shannon Dorcy. “We recognize the human connection, and we see how nurses play such an important role in being discoverers and proactive researchers in the cancer field.”
Prophet-Williams treasured the figurine.
“I brought it from MD Anderson with me to Cedars Sinai, and then this chief nursing officer position came up,” she said. “I wanted to get back to a more academic center. And when I interviewed, I fell in love with the people and culture at Fred Hutch. It’s almost as if the mouse was leading me back to where I was supposed to be."
