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Kayla Hefner, RN, began working in health care at a young age.
Image by Evan Lewis
Early Experiences Set Myeloma Center Nurse on Her Current Course
| Kayla Hefner, RN, has been in health care nearly her entire life.
“My mother worked in the human resources department at the old Doctors Hospital in Little Rock,” said Hefner, a nurse with the Myeloma Center in the Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS). “As a teenager, I mostly worked as a volunteer answering phones, shredding documents, and doing all of the mail for the hospital, and it taught me to be very comfortable in a hospital setting.”
Health care careers are an important part of Hefner’s family.
“Three of my sisters followed me into nursing, and one of my brothers is a radiologic technologist,” said Hefner, a North Little Rock native who has been at UAMS since 2012. “We love medicine in my family.”
Hefner welcomes the challenge of working with multiple myeloma patients and admires how they approach their journey.
“Multiple myeloma patients educate themselves about their disease. I learn more from my patients than they do from me. I enjoy talking with them and their families — I have close relationships because I have been seeing many of them for years.
“I want them to know they have someone in their corner when they’re scared or don’t know what to do. I want to be a sounding board and be able to help guide them in the right direction,” she added.
Hefner got her first paying job in a hospital at age 16 and has been on this path ever since.
“I knew medicine was what I wanted to do,” she said.