If anyone was born to be an emergency room nurse, it was Jennifer Heffernan Miner. She’s calm, cool, organized and confident. Her meticulous attention to detail about how things are supposed to run exposes her desired goal for perfection.
Those qualities shine through whether she is sitting at her desk or walking around showing off the bright and shiny stateof-the-art equipment at the Neighbors Emergency Center facilities she now runs in Harlingen and Brownsville.
For 20 years, Jennifer thrived in the chaos that is an emergency room. She went from nurse to charge nurse, the one who manages the entire floor during a shift.
“My goal was always to become an RN and work in an emergency room,” she says.
In order to know why Jennifer chose her path and is where she is now, you need to know her history.
It starts as early as how she and her family ended up in the Valley. Born in and raised in Ontario, Canada, Jennifer moved to the Valley when she was 15 years old.
Her mother was a nurse and there was a nursing shortage in the United States. Her mother was recruited to come to Harlingen to work at a local hospital in the ER.
In the meantime Jennifer attended high school in Harlingen. She remembers the stories and experiences her mother talked about while working long, rough hours in the ER.
Jennifer didn’t look at it that way.
“She would come home from work and talk about all the stuff they did,” Jennifer says with an excitement still on her face as though she still remembered the stories vividly.
“For me, I was like that sounds so awesome and so fun. It was just a natural progression for me to do that.”
After high school, Jennifer worked as a pharmacy tech. But, she never let her eyes off her goal.
She was newly married and had a child. So, she worked and attended school to become a licensed vocational nurse.
“I did feel like following in her footsteps,” Jennifer says. “I was a young mother and I needed stability.
Nurses always have a job and the pay is good with benefits. That was a consideration. “I became an adult early and I had to think of my family. I had to do it quick. It helped me focus where I needed to be.”
Once she became an LVN, she worked for a year and went to RN school.
“That was my goal,” she says. “It was hard to go back to school and have a young child. I had to go to night school and I worked at the time and was doing home health. But you have to push through.”
