Stacey L. Steves MSN, RN, CRNP, AOCNP is an Instructor at Georgetown University School of Nursing (GUSON) with over 30 years of clinical nursing experience at the bedside, in clinical research, and as a nurse practitioner in the field of pediatric and adult medical and surgical cancer care. She has taught at Georgetown University since 2019 in the clinical and classroom settings. She is certified by the American Nurses Credentialing Center as an adult nurse practitioner and by the Oncology Nursing Society as an Advanced Oncology Certified Nurse Practitioner.
Professor Steves has translated her clinical experience into teaching the next generation of nurses in the hospital and the classroom. Her teaching philosophy centers around delivering essential academic content in the context of five specific elements: community building, clear communication, positive reinforcement, constructive feedback, and fostering relationships. Professor Steves strongly believes that clinical and classroom learning should be simultaneously challenging and rewarding. Another essential focus in her classes is to encourage the love of lifelong learning, as patient care is ever-changing and becoming more complex in nursing and the broader healthcare arena.
Upon graduating from Georgetown University in 1993 with a Bachelor of Science in Nursing, Professor Steves pursued a career as an oncology nurse. She entered the United States Public Health Service, beginning her clinical practice at the National Institutes of Health’s Clinical Center, caring for pediatric oncology and pediatric HIV/AIDs patients. During this time, she was exposed to vulnerable patients and families from across the United States suffering from social determinants of health and experiencing health disparities and inequities. Her experiences at the NIH resulted in a deep interest in providing comprehensive cancer care throughout the disease continuum to at-risk populations and in the importance of clinical research in improving the care and clinical outcomes of the oncology patient. These interests led her to the Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Research Center at Georgetown University Hospital, where she practiced as a clinical research nurse caring for patients receiving investigational cancer therapies until 1997.
In 2000, Professor Steves graduated from the Oncology Advanced Practice Nurse Practitioner Program at the University of Pennsylvania with a Master of Science in Nursing. She returned to Washington, D.C., where she worked at Medstar Washington Hospital Center in the Washington Cancer Institute as a Medical and Surgical Oncology Nurse Practitioner from 2000 to 2010. She also served as the Advanced Practice Provider Program Director at the Washington Cancer Institute from 2006 to 2010. Professor Steves transitioned to the Inova Interventional Oncology Clinic at Inova Schar Cancer Institute in 2010 to provide advanced oncology nursing care for an ethnically diverse population of primary and secondary liver cancer patients receiving state-of-the-art tumor-directed therapies.
Professor Steves’s clinical and personal experiences with cancer patients and their families in various treatment settings were instrumental in solidifying her understanding of the critical role patient-centered communication plays in providing high-quality cancer care to marginalized communities. As a clinician and a teacher, she emphasizes the importance of excellent communication, which she believes is not innate but a learned behavior. Professor Steves looks at communication as a great leveler. If done well, communication brings people together and is the basis of human connection, which is essential to providing the best care to each patient encountered.
Professor Steves’s research interests focus on the role of patient-provider communication in addressing cancer health disparities and inequities in ethnically diverse and marginalized cancer patients. She is particularly interested in using Mixed-Methods research to understand the complexities of transactional communication between patients and their healthcare providers.
Professor Steves is a Ph.D. candidate at George Mason University. She is currently planning her dissertation study investigating the communication between urban Black men with colon cancer and their cancer providers and how this communication affects shared decision-making throughout colon cancer treatment.