From a young age, Elizabeth Jacobs Young, Director of Invasive Cardiology at Northwest Health - Porter, has been attentively lending a hand to others in need of care. Her experience with nursing duties stems back to before she even reached working age.
“Taking care of people is all I’ve ever done,” Jacobs Young said. “I actually started assisting my mom in taking care of private duty patients when I was 12. Then I became a nurse’s aide at an extended living facility when I was 16. I started to go to nursing school straight out of high school, stopped and had my children, and went back to nursing school when I was 25.”
After studying nursing at the University of Southern Indiana, she worked at various healthcare facilities before beginning her career at Northwest Health in 2019. Caring for people has always been her passion because it makes a difference and makes her feel useful.
Over the years, Jacobs Young has gone from taking care of patients to equipping a team so they can then provide care for patients. In the past, patients have told Jacobs Young and the cardiology team that they can tell that the staff cares, which she feels means that they are doing something right.
With all the positive feedback from patients and hard work pouring in for Jacobs Young and her team, higher-ups took notice of her job performance and named her Clinical Manager of the Year at Northwest Health - Porter. Jacobs Young was stunned and took the recognition as a definite sign that she was doing something right.
“It felt great to be recognized by management,” she said. “The fact that I was recognized means that my whole group was recognized. I think that our willingness to go out of our way to help others inside the hospital was also recognized. When things are tough in other places and our department has the ability to send nurses to help on another floor, we do. We can get somebody something for lunch or maybe we have time to go and help move patients in the emergency room. I feel like being recognized as Clinical Manager of the Year just let us know that we as a department are here for the rest of the hospital. It was good to know that we were doing a great job.”
As someone who initially provided care for patients directly, Jacobs Young was unsure if she was cut out for leading a team of people to provide that care. Being recognized for her leadership made her feel more confident that she was on the right path.
Working with the experienced and talented staff in the cardiology department is Jacobs Young’s favorite part of her job. She said it is a joy to be with them, and they all made her feel so welcome when she first started working at Northwest Health. She even recalled that her favorite work memory was her first birthday at the hospital. Her birthday came around a short while after she started, and she was surprised at how the cardiology department celebrated her at that early stage in her current position.
Jacobs Young is happy to work at Northwest Health and is proud of how she and other staff members help patients who come in at their most vulnerable and leave feeling cared for.
At home, she and her husband stay occupied by caring for their many pets. They have four dogs and two cats and Jacobs Young raises rabbits for 4H and brings them to open shows. Outside of pet care, she and her husband are enjoying their recently purchased mountain bikes they ride across trails in the area.
