Mick Bauer Joins Clare Housing as Newest Registered Nurse — April 17, 2023

Mick Bauer (he/him) brings a wealth of knowledge in acute care and community nursing to Clare Housing. His passion for housing, his warmth and engaging nature are sure to make him an excellent addition to the team!

Can you tell us what initially attracted you to work with Clare Housing?

I first heard of Clare Housing and its excellent reputation in my previous work providing RN care in homeless shelters. One particular patient of mine who had HIV  was very particular about where he was willing to live, and the housing counselors I collaborated with were hugely relieved when he agreed to move to a Clare Housing facility! Clare Housing has a longstanding reputation for providing safe, HIV/AIDS-centric housing services; and our target demographic is an important group within the population to which I’ve dedicated my healthcare career: people who are homeless or generally disadvantaged.

Tell us a bit about your work history and how you expect this experience to inform your new role.

 I’ve worked in acute care (at Regions Hospital), where I discovered that I have an especially strong affinity for people suffering from substance abuse disorders, and for people who are unhoused. Working as a full-time vaccinator at the height of the pandemic gave me a taste of public health nursing. And for the past two years, I ran a single-RN practice for Fairview Community Nursing in which I provided on-site, direct, nursing care and care coordination at a number of homeless shelters, including Bethesda Shelter, Our Saviour’s Shelter, Project Home, and Family Service Center.

The latter job was extremely rewarding, but also largely improvised — I was hired in part to figure out just exactly what “direct nursing care with care coordination” would entail, so I made a lot of my job up as I went along! In summary, it feels like almost everything I did in health care previously has brought me to this job, and I’m eager to meet the challenge!

What personal values are you looking forward to bringing to this new role?

My previous career (computer network security) was all about problem-solving, and managing differing agendas between the various stakeholders for each security problem I helped solve. So, I have a lot of experience in listening to people, and making sure they feel heard and valued in whatever pursuit we’re working on together. This has immediate and tangible utility in my work as a nurse: it may have taken too long, but nowadays in Western medicine we view healthcare as a collaborative effort between caregivers and patients.

At more of a gut level, I think empathy for my patients is also a strength. No patient is just a bunch of symptoms and conditions; beneath every serious medical condition is suffering and fear. Too often, the subjects of that fear include medical treatment and practitioners! I believe it’s every healthcare practitioner’s holy duty to see and respect not only what medical things are happening to patients, but how our patients experience, and especially feel about, those things.

Tell us a fun or surprising fact about you, or about what you like to do in your free time!

I’m on sort of a quest to learn as many obsolete trade skills as possible. So far these have mainly involved making pre-20^th century style wooden flutes, servicing and repairing antique pocket watches, turning wood bowls and candleholders on a lathe, and making many of the tools involved in all three pursuits.

Lately I’ve also taken up blacksmithing! I’ve set up a smithy in my garage. Blacksmithing is exactly as cathartic as it looks – smashing orange-hot steel with a hammer is just an outstanding way to work off excess frustration and stress!

We’re glad to have you on the team, Mick! And we can’t wait to learn more about your pre-20th century crafts!