Aaron Bellow teaches online courses for UNLV’s nurse practitioner programs, pre-licensure students training to become registered nurses, and doctoral students obtaining a terminal degree in nursing.
When he’s not instructing, Bellow practices at Southwest Medical Associates in the digital health department as a telehealth provider. He and his team see a variety of visit types: simple episodic visits (such as sore throats or urinary tract infections), health maintenance visits (annual labs or medicine refills), chronic disease treatment and management (diabetes or high blood pressure), and combination visits.
Practicing once a week might sound easy, but it’s a packed day, especially in pandemic times. Bellow said before COVID, they saw an average of 80 patients a day. These days, he said patient volumes can reach 200-300 cases daily.
Balancing both roles is what Bellow describes as scholarship of practice. He explained, “It means we implement current evidence-based practice guidelines within our practice, evaluate those outcomes, and then disseminate that by sharing best practices with our students, making sure (they) are also using the most current guidelines and generating the best patient outcomes,” he explained.
Bellow admits he prefers the educator side of his professional career, especially so he can watch his students develop. “What I enjoy the most is seeing them take in what is a lot of times very complex information and using the combination of my experience as a teacher and nurse/nurse practitioner and helping them to make those connections, incorporate that new knowledge, and see them sort of develop into this professional nurse.”
He added the practice side is mainly to have the experience and expertise to augment his teaching role, which is how he planned his nursing career from the beginning. “I taught at a university in Houston and decided I really liked the role, which is why I decided to pursue a doctorate degree, knowing that at this part of my career, I wanted it to be teaching-based.”
Education is not something he takes lightly. He bristles at the misconception that those who can’t do, teach. “All the effective teachers have been the nurses who were most effective in their role. Nursing is what we call an art and a science. It's very difficult to teach both the art and the science of nursing without being competent in that role. The art of nursing is the nuance, the intuition, the aspect that's based on many years of patient experience. Being able to translate that into some tangible form that the students can grasp takes a lot of advanced skill. The best teachers have mastered nursing in their respective content areas.”
