Sanders and her husband decided they wouldn’t move back to Seattle — the city had gotten too big and busy for the young family. They instead decided on the Tri-Cities area in Washington, where they remained for the next 23 years. Sanders found work again as a nurse. Though she always saw herself as a charge nurse, she was quickly promoted through the ranks until she was promoted to chief nursing officer. The role was demanding, but she did find time for non-work trips to keep her love of travel alive. She took her daughter to Morocco and Spain before her daughter took off on her own adventures throughout Asia and beyond.
As life continued to speed along, Sanders remembers the moment she saw another job posting that would alter her life. This time it was from the Joint Commission International (JCI), an organization devoted to driving excellence in healthcare through adherence to best-practices. Seen as the gold standard for international hospital accreditation, the commission sets standards for different types of healthcare organizations including hospitals, academic medical centers, primary care, ambulatory and home health care centers.
“Joint Commission International is really about trying to focus hospitals on having higher standards for quality and patient safety,” Sanders explained. “Different countries tend to have different issues and standards.”
The job listing was for a surveyor. In the role, Sanders would travel abroad to monitor a hospital and its staff and then make recommendations to improve patient outcomes and hospital efficacy. The position was listed as an intermittent commitment, meaning Sanders would travel six times per year for up to a week at a time. The rest of the year, she hoped to keep her job as chief nursing officer. That meant telling her stateside boss about her sporadic overseas roles. She said, “Somehow I managed to convince my boss it was worth it and we made it work.”
That was nearly 15 years ago. Sanders found a way to juggle her busy domestic job and look forward to her JCI appointments that would take her around the world for up to a week at a time.
In 2015, Sanders was recruited to work as a chief nursing officer at a busy hospital in Mumbai, India. With her children grown and gone, Sanders decided she was ready for another international adventure. In India, there were many unique cultural norms to which Sanders and her husband had to adjust. For one, Sanders’ schedule looked a little different.
“We lived really well in India, because it was a very wealthy hospital I worked at,” Sanders said. “But I also worked six days a week.”
Sanders found she was able to build strong relationships with the nurse managers she worked with and was able to help them grow in their careers, which she says was one of the most impactful parts of living in India for a year.
“I still keep in touch with them,” Sanders said. “And when I go back to India, we have a reunion. I spent about two months in Qatar two years ago, and so we had a reunion there, also.”