Kristen Cline is a professional development practitioner for the Emergency Service Line at Stanford Tri-Valley Medical Center and holds an academic affiliation with Stanford University.
With over 15 years of experience in emergency departments, intensive care units, and critical care transport, she brings clinical depth and a commitment to education and advocacy.
Kristen is board-certified in multiple specialties and speaks nationally for organizations such as Paragon Education and Solheim Enterprises, focusing on certification review and emergency nursing practice.
She has authored and co-authored several publications and textbooks, including contributions to the Emergency Nursing Scope and Standards of Practice, 3rd edition.
Her peer-reviewed work includes articles in Annals of Emergency Medicine, on "Optimizing Pediatric Patient Safety in the Emergency Care Setting," and in Pediatrics, on "Access to Optimal Emergency Care for Children."
Recognized among ENA Connection's "20 under 40," she advocates for nurse wellness and trauma-informed care through speaking engagements, her Medium blog, and social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook.
Everything we know about keeping people alive under pressure we learned from war. Triage was invented on a Napoleonic battlefield. Tourniquets, hemostatic dressings, damage control resuscitation, the golden hour itself. Military surgeons figured out how to stop bleeding and move casualties while the ground was still shaking, and civilian medicine inherited every lesson. The emergency department and the battlefield have always been adjacent theaters, running the same protocols under different …
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Health care cyberattacks expose a critical national security failure
When I told ProPublica that it was too expensive to protect us, I was naming what every number in this piece confirms. The system made a calculation about what our lives were worth, and it got the math catastrophically wrong.
I have been a nurse for almost 20 years, working in emergency departments, intensive care units, and eventually the back of a helicopter as a flight nurse. I have watched the …
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The shadow ledger: Uncovering the financial cost of nursing turnover
Every ED has patients who become part of the landscape. They come in once or twice a week, for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes they have chronic medical conditions they are unable to manage. Sometimes they are on the outskirts of society due to mental health or substance abuse disorders. The ER promises a few hours of sleep in a safe place and a meal. I formed an uneasy alliance …
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How one unforgettable ER patient taught a nurse about resilience
The Pitt was compelling TV.
As an emergency nurse educator for a Stanford campus in Northern California, there is one thing that is required viewing for my new graduate nurses: The Pitt.
The ambitious series did an admirable job portraying the complex world of the emergency department. The procedures were clinically accurate. The spectrum of patients and social issues was nuanced and believable. They even showcased the incidence of post-COVID PTSD, an …
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America’s ER crisis: Why the system is collapsing from within
