Aurora grad says her faith led to her career in healthcare
Lindsay (Hattan) Gould credits her faith with leading her to a career as a respiratory therapist and information technology (IT) specialist at Nebraska Children’s Hospital in Omaha.
While growing up in Aurora, Gould says she and her sister, Jacque (Carden), were motivated by their parents, Joann and Roger Hattan, to pursue ambitious careers as they looked toward working in the medical field.
“My parents encouraged me towards a career in healthcare,” Gould said. “Considering options, I became interested in respiratory therapy while in high school.”
After graduating from Aurora High School in 2002, Gould attended Nebraska Methodist College in Omaha where she and her sister actively participated in Omaha’s Campus Crusade for Christ ministry, which is known as CRU today.
“When I was in college, they offered summer mission trips,” she explained.
A new passion was sparked when, after graduating from Nebraska Methodist in 2006, a mission trip with CRU took her to Tokyo.
“That was my first time being out of the country and I think traveling to Japan is unlike many other places in the world,” she explained. “It’s very different, their culture and everything.”
“That pushed me to pursue what I thought at the time, that I maybe would want to pursue missionary-type work,” Gould stated.
Moving to Chicago soon after the mission trip, Gould studied for her Masters in Biblical Studies at Moody Bible Institute (MBI). While she says what she learned there would help her in any walk of life, it wasn’t easy to leave behind what she started in the medical field.
“My parents were like, ‘You’ve got this college degree, you have loans, you should work and do that,’” Gould recounted.
To help fund her studies at MBI and pay off her college loans, Gould began working as a respiratory therapist at Chicago’s Children’s Memorial Hospital which later became the Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital.
“I got to be there during the transition,” she stated. “I worked exclusively in the neonatal intensive care unit and absolutely loved it. We saw the sickest of the sick patients for that region. It was an incredible place.”
She said that experience reignited her passion for respiratory therapy.
“It’s pretty meaningful work,” Gould stated. “What I did in Chicago was literally taking care of premature babies every single day. It was amazing, because you take of them for months at a time and see them grow, get better and be able to go home and you feel like you really have this amazing impact on life.”
While she loved her work in Chicago, Gould said she was determined to return home to Nebraska.
“I knew I would come back someday,” she commented. “I love Nebraska and Chicago is a very expensive place to live in, even short-term.”
In 2015, Gould moved to Gretna to work at Nebraska Children’s Hospital in Omaha. After working in respiratory therapy for another year, she was offered a new opportunity to work as an Epic analyst, helping keep both software and hardware updated at Children’s.
“It was something I dabbled in at Chicago a little bit,” Gould explained. “They will hire people who have a background in nursing or respiratory therapy to work as an analyst with the documentation program. They’ll teach sort of teach you the ‘IT’ side of it knowing that you understand the healthcare side of it which is so valuable when trying to configure this system for nurses, respiratory therapists and physicians who are using it.”
Since then, Gould has worked throughout the hospital keeping software and hardware up to date for the benefit of both staff and patients.
“Obviously technology is a part of everything, especially in health care,” she stated. “So still being able to have a impact on a patient’s experience at Children’s and the outcomes through technology is really rewarding.”
Gould got married in 2018 and she and her husband, Matthew continue to live in Gretna with their 2-year-old daughter, Josie. Matthew works at Nelnet in Lincoln.
While her move back to Nebraska brought her closer to family, Gould was blessed to be reunited with her sister, when Jacque and her family moved to Gretna last year. Carden now works as coordinator of quality care in the cardiac unit at Children’s.
“We live under a mile away from one another,” Gould said. “We both have the opportunity to work from home, which is great.”
As she continues her work at Children’s, Gould says she still finds opportunities to practice her faith and put her studies at MBI to use every day in helping care for the patients she encounters.
“My faith has always been a very important part of my life,” Gould commented. “I feel those valuable experiences and involvement that I had in both of those places has aided me personally and professionally ever since.”
Carden is also happy to be doing life with her sister on a daily basis and will be featured in an upcoming edition of “Where Are They Now?”