Page 23 - Johns Hopkins Nursing Magazine Spring 2023 - Johns Hopkins School of Nursing

Leadership is as big a part of Ayla Chase’s

nature as the Great Outdoors themselves NEWS FROM JOHNS HOPKINS NURSING

Conveniently, it also offers access to ocean surfing, the
Appalachian Trail, and various climbing and mountain
biking environments, all within a couple of hours. For
quieter moments, Chase has her guitars. Music is the
one place she’ll admit to having mellowed just a bit from
her teen days of shredding on the skateboard and the ax.

Still, if she has her way, Chase—trained as a volunteer
firefighter and EMT as well as a soldier—quiet moments
will always be the exception.

So, after she earns the MSN in Spring ’24? “I’m going
to immediately apply for the DNP for family nurse
practitioner because I do want to work in more rural
settings. There’s just a far greater scope of practice you 21
can do with that. I volunteer a lot, so in that role [DNP-
“It was paramount FNP] you can be part of mission planning for search-
and-rescue organizations—Red Cross, Rubicon—there’s
just a ton of them that really need these roles.”
that I get to be And Chase sees only growth for the field. “Regardless

of what your stance is on global warming, we have
with people.” seen and will continue to see an increase in the severity,
duration, and frequency of environmental disasters,
domestically and internationally. And a huge portion
of wilderness nursing is being able to ‘deploy’ to these
A military brat, Chase was born in Italy to an Air Force arenas and provide care with small, very driven teams
dad whose career journey took the family to Alaska, that can think critically.”
South Carolina, Germany, and finally Florida, where he
retired as a master sergeant. Such a nomadic life is not Meanwhile, Chase and a few others in her MSN cohort
for everyone. Ayla Chase could never wait to get to the are founders of Johns Hopkins’ first adventure medicine
next stop. New school? No problem: Sports were always team. “Think of it as an umbrella term, because there’s
a way around any awkwardness, and that has frankly a lot that falls under it. There’s disaster relief and
never changed. humanitarian aid. There’s expedition medical planning
management, like being up there on Mount Everest,
“From very early in my childhood it was a sense of providing medical care in these austere environments—
adventure,” she explains. “When we found out where incredibly unique and resource-minimized situations. MAGAZINE.NURSING.JHU.EDU
we going next, we started researching. ‘What can we That’s wilderness medicine. … It’s acute care in settings
get into there? Board sports? Outdoors?’ I did the same that are unpredictable.”
thing when I came here for Johns Hopkins.” Baltimore
meant her first choice of nursing schools, naturally. And embraceable, if you’re Ayla Chase. ◼