A desire to help and the excitement of not knowing what each day would bring guided Kristal Sullivan toward an emergency nursing career that has spanned nearly 25 years. Sullivan’s first experience with emergency care was volunteering as an EMT-basic.
“I started running rescue and I was like, ‘This is kind of fun.’ No two days, no two hours are ever the same,” Sullivan said. “You pull up on the side of the road, and it’s very much like emergency nursing. They’re having the worst day of their life. How can I work with them and how can I help them is really what drove me to emergency nursing.”
The work inspired her to attend nursing school, and in 2001, she joined the emergency department at Bon Secours St. Mary’s Hospital upon graduation.
About five years later, a pregnant Sullivan was working her ED shift when her mentor – “an ED nurse’s ED nurse” – noticed Sullivan wasn’t feeling good. Following her instincts, the nurse insisted on taking Sullivan’s blood pressure and obtaining a urine sample.
“She was the first person to recognize I had pregnancy-induced hypertension and sent me home,” Sullivan said. Robert was born six days later at 27 weeks, requiring intensive care. Today, he is a healthy college student, but the experience caring for her own fragile infant prompted Sullivan to make a move.
“Our journey through the NICU led me to leave adult trauma nursing which I loved, to reunite with my passion for pediatrics,” she said, and she took a position at Children’s Hospital of The King’s Daughters in Norfolk, Virginia, where she has worked for 18 years, many of them in the ED.
Sullivan joined ENA early in her career. She has been an active part of the Virginia State ENA and will serve as its 2026 president. She is also ENPC and TNCC faculty and a TNAC provider and instructor.
“When I started in the ED, that was one of the conversations my preceptor had with me: ‘Here’s your professional organization. Here’s where the standards come from. Here’s where all of our guidelines come from. Everything we do that’s evidence-based nursing is going to come from there,’” she recalled.
Her husband, Brian, a firefighter she met when she was volunteering with emergency rescue services, is the council’s unofficial tech support person, she said. While Brian pitches in for ENA, Sullivan is a regular at his firehouse. She offers “pediatric pearls” and other tips when Brian leads education for his firefighters, who affectionately refer to her as “Mama Sullivan.”
Sullivan’s current role is the program manager of professional staff quality at Children’s Hospital of The King’s Daughters. She chose to leave the ED after a time during which she dealt with a lot of grief, including the loss of her grandmother.
“It was the emotional toll. I needed to be able to separate and spread my wings in other areas,” Sullivan said.
Despite stepping away from the stretcher, she said her background supports what she does now, and she still supports emergency nurses.
“Everything I learned as an ED nurse and my journey with emergency nursing led to my current role,” she said.