Carden works to boost patient care at Children’s Nebraska
For Aurora native Jacque (Hattan) Carden, improving patient care has been a career-long mission, and now she has the added joy of living and working near both her sister and her parents.
Growing up alongside her sister, Lindsay (Gould) in Aurora, Carden says the sisters were motivated by their parents, Roger and Joann Hatten to pursue ambitious careers.
“My parents had always encouraged us to work either in technology or healthcare, so I just gravitated towards nursing,” Carden explained.
Soon after graduating from Aurora High School in 2003, she studied for two years at Nebraska Wesleyan University and the University of Nebraska-Omaha before attending the University of Nebraska Medical Center.
Wanting to do more in the medical field, Carden returned to Nebraska Wesleyan after graduating from UNMC in 2007 to pursue a master’s of science in nursing.
“I was excited to do the master’s degree,” she stated. “I knew I wanted to do something beyond patient care and that opened up a lot of doors to other positions within healthcare.”
One of the first opportunities Carden had to work outside of direct patient care was at Allergy, Asthma and Immunology Associates P.C. in Lincoln, which she worked as a registered nurse throughout her time at Nebraska Wesleyan.
“That was super fun to get to know that area of healthcare,” she commented.
After graduating with her master’s, Carden and her husband, Trevor, (the couple was married in 2006) moved to Birmingham, Ala., where he began working on his PhD in genetics at the University of Alabama (UAB) in 2011. During their time there, Carden joined the faculty at UAB as the clinical coordinator of the adult cystic fibrosis program, which works to keep the university accredited with the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation (CFF)
“I served as a mentor for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation,” she stated. “I was a consultant for them and would travel to other adult cystic fibrosis programs and mentor their team on program development and quality improvement.’’
Through meeting with other programs, they developed new ways to treat the disease and improve patient care.
“There tends to just be one care center per state and once you start trading knowledge with people on a national level, it’s a pretty small group,” Carden stated. “It was really fun to get connected with other programs around the country and share ideas.”
During her time at UAB, Carden was involved in 13 different improvement studies, one of which saw improvement in a patient’s lungs through forced expiratory volume in one second (FEV1), which measures a patient’s lung capacity when dealing with cystic fibrosis or other lung diseases.
“Over the course about a year and a half, we were able to increase our patient’s lung function by over 10 percent,” Carden explained. “That’s really significant because this cystic fibrosis patient at the time would typically lose two to three percent of their lung function every year.”
Through the studies conducted over seven years, Carden was able to help triple the annual grant funding for the CFF.
Reflecting on her time at UAB and Birmingham, she says meeting people was a cherished part of her career.
“I loved living in Birmingham,” she commented. “It really started to feel like home because we were there for so long and met so many great people.
In 2018, Trevor was offered a position in the medical device company Teleflex, which meant the family moving to Morrisville, N.C..
“We knew that was just going to be for a year,” Carden commented. “I took that year to hang out with our oldest son James and enjoy all the beautiful lakes and scenery around North Carolina.”
In 2019 the Carden family moved back to Nebraska where they now live in Gretna. She gave birth to the couple’s her second son Andrew the following year. In 2023, Carden began her new career at Nebraska Children’s Hospital as a clinical effectiveness project coordinator for the Crisis Heart Center.
“I consult the heart center for quality improvement work,” she explained. “The Heart Center at Children’s does a lot of cardiothoracic surgeries. There’s a lot of non-invasive imaging that happens for the cardiac patients and so my role is to design quality improvement studies to help improve our outcomes.”
Being the first person in the position, Carden says it has been both a challenging and yet rewarding experience for her.
“Cardiology is very new to me,” she stated. “I’ve spent my nursing career in pulmonary, so the heart side of things is new to me, but I’m able to apply the quality improvement work that I’ve done at University of Alabama... at Children’s.”
While they don’t work in the same departments, Carden said being able to work somewhat close to her sister has been one of her favorite parts working at Children’s.
“I’m in the office and (I also) work from home, but our office suites are right next to each other,” she commented. “Which is super fun because Children’s is a pretty big institution now. It’s really special when I run into her at work. I love it there and it’s a dream to be able to work at the same place as Lindsay.”
In addition to working near each other, Gould and Carden live less than a mile apart and both attend Brookside Church in Gretna.
“It’s been nice to be back and so fun to live so close to my sister, with her being just a mile away,” Carden said, “and for our kids get to grow up together.”
An added benefit is being close their parents who still live in Aurora.
“My parents live on a tree farm on an acreage, so my boys are always asking him to go back to the farm and ride the gator or the tractor with Papa,” Carden said. “We have a lot of fun going back there for holidays and when kids have a break from school.”
Carden said she is grateful for her work experiences and for the relationships she has built both in Alabama and Nebraska.
“Honestly at both places, it’s been the people that I’ve worked with and the team that we had at the University of Alabama,” Carden said. “We did a lot together as a team and it was hard to leave University of Alabama, because of the culture that we had on our team and we’ve all been together for so long. At the same time, the Children’s team that I have in quality and patient safety — that’s the kind of the department that I work in — are incredible. It really is like a family.”