I’m Aware That I’m Rare: Elise Whalen, APRN (335)

The phaware® interview

Elise Whalen is a pediatric Nurse Practitioner from Texas Children’s Hospital’s Pulmonary Hypertension program. In this episode, she discusses her role as an NP, congenital diaphragmatic hernia, and the impact PH not only has on her patients, but parental anxiety that impacts the entire family.

My name is Elise Whalen. I am a pediatric hypertension nurse practitioner at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, Texas. We are one of the accredited pediatric PH centers and we’re the only one in Texas. We get patients from really all over the country. We’re also a lung transplant center. I would say we’d have about 350 to 375 patients that we follow directly, and we’re growing every day. We have a pretty expansive team. We have social work. We have a nurse coordinator. I am the only nurse practitioner on the team. We have six physicians and we’re trying to recruit more exercise specialists, a whole gamut of awesome people to help us kind of provide a multidisciplinary approach to our care.