Research, practice, training – Sophie Hovis does as much as she can to advocate for health awareness and resources for both her patients and fellow healthcare workers.

The Beth-El College of Nursing alumna and perioperative nurse, who works for CommonSpirit Health at Penrose Hospital, divides her time between treating patients, conducting research on mental health and suicide prevention, training colleagues and learning as much as she can. Sophie noted the hands-on experience and clinical training available in Beth-El, which attracted her to UCCS and the program.

“There were a lot of clinical nurses that also work as clinical instructors and as faculty at UCCS, so I got to know some of them while I was in clinical rotations and I noticed that UCCS has a really well-respected nursing program out in the community,” said Sophie. “When I started to get to know some of the faculty, they were really invested in the success of their students and very aware of the pressures that are in nursing. I felt like they really cared about our ability to complete the program on time and were super supportive.”

Sophie first earned her associate’s degree from Pikes Peak State College before transferring to UCCS. While pursuing her bachelor’s, she took a nursing research class and met Assistant Professor Jennifer Zohn, Ph.D, who introduced Sophie to the research side of her field.

“Jennifer asked me to participate in a nursing research project that would be through the undergraduate research program, so we applied for that and got grant funding and since then, our relationship and our research and projects have exploded into different things,” said Sophie.

In the realm of nursing research, Sophie has a particular interest in best practices and information driving nursing standards and mental health awareness in healthcare workers, which made her a perfect fit for working with Jennifer.

“It was this weird, really serendipitous moment,” shared Sophie. “I had no idea what her area of interest was, and it was mental health and suicide prevention, and I’ve struggled with mental health issues all my life and I wanted to help people that had also been in that position.”

Sophie and Professor Zohn’s first project was a narrative review of the literature that currently exists on the effect of COVID on suicide risk factors.

“We first looked at a lot of different populations, not just healthcare workers, and presented that project at Mountain Lion Research Day,” said Sophie. “We had done all the work for the narrative review and felt like moving in a more healthcare worker-specific direction was really interesting to us. So we redid our literature search, developed a manuscript and were published in the Journal of Clinical Nursing.”

Beyond being published, Sophie and Jennifer received the opportunity to present at some conferences and learn about suicide prevention in other cultures.

“We presented at a virtual nursing conference in Englewood and then at the 32nd World Conference of the International Association of Suicide Prevention in Slovenia,” Sophie said. “It’s a huge international organization and we ended up getting accepted for a podium and poster presentation, and were able to travel there with our significant others. It was five days long with hundreds of attendees and it was a really amazing experience.”

Sophie also won a Pikes Peak region Nightingale Luminary Award in 2024, and her advocacy efforts began to get recognized by her supervisors and administrative leaders.

“Our Chief Nursing Officer was sitting next to me at the Nightingale ceremony and he mentioned the need to do more at our hospital in terms of suicide prevention,” she said. “The administration agreed to pay for my certification in Question, Persuade, Refer training for me to teach fellow nurses and staff at our three Colorado Springs hospitals.”

Question, Persuade, Refer, known widely as QPR, is a longstanding training that teaches how to recognize someone at risk and how to intervene and refer them to resources. It’s been likened to a mental health form of CPR, and does not require any sort of healthcare background to learn.

“We officially launched in February, and I just taught my fifth class and have thirteen to go,” Sophie said. “We’ll have hopefully trained 260 people between our three hospitals by the end of it. We’ve had a lot of people self enroll that weren’t required to take the course, so we’ve had a really good institutional response from it.”

Another research pursuit of Sophie’s is the study of Bair Hugger machines for preoperative use to lower hypothermia rates in patients undergoing surgery, particularly large abdominal surgeries.

“When we use anesthesia it shunts our autonomic vasoconstriction function,” Sophie explained. “So when we’re cold our blood flow should go to the core, like our head, torso and vital organs. But the way that anesthesia works it doesn’t allow that to happen, so you end up having this intense core temperature drop with anesthesia and that can lead to all sorts of different complications. With the Bair Hugger, essentially you put on the gown like you would a normal medical gown, but there’s a port that gets hooked up to a machine and basically it just blows warm air into the different compartments of the gown. It’s better than warm blankets because the warm blankets cool off and this stays warm continuously.”

On top of her research and clinical work, Sophie holds positions in nursing shared governance to help identify and manage aspects of her field. She acts as a member of the senate of nurses, a evidence- and research-based nursing council, is the national market representative for CommonSpirit and is a member of their Zero Suicide Committee.

Sophie’s important efforts and hard work tie in to her goals to help not just her patients, but her fellow healthcare workers as well. With the responsibilities and stressors that come with nursing, including PTSD, violent encounters, traumatic events and burnout, she emphasized how crucial it is that nurses and similar professions need resources and care as well.

“I think we come into the workforce a little under-equipped for the challenges of the profession,” she acknowledged. “Sometimes we’re under resourced and that makes the stress even more heightened, and we don’t do a whole lot of debriefing or self-care related to the things that we see on the job. We need to maintain a mentally healthy workforce to be able to maintain the profession as a whole over the next couple of decades. The better that we take care of ourselves, the better that we can take care of our patients.”

“I became a nurse because I wanted to do important work,” Sophie concluded. “And I do important work every day with my patients and with the research that I do. If we can find a way to take better care of each other in nursing, grow our skills coping with stress and lead healthier, happier lives inside and outside of work, that’s a benefit for everybody involved. That’s a benefit for the nurses. It’s a benefit for the patients that we care for. I work with incredible people doing amazing things every day, and I see in my mind’s eye the potential and what we could do if we had these skills and the support and the infrastructure. I think there’s just so much there that could be done.”