Steamboat Springs-based nurse Shani McNamara Bohlin wants to fill some gaps she sees in health care industry with her new concierge nursing company, Blue Skies Nursing.

“I created Blue Skies Nursing after recognizing several service gaps in our ever-changing health care environment,” McNamara Bohlin said. “During my career as a registered nurse and nurse administrator, I have seen more and more medical needs being delegated to hesitant family members, untrained personnel or to the patients themselves due to insurance restrictions, budget cuts and lack of staff.”

That inspired the nurse with more than a decade of experience to establish Blue Skies Nursing, which aims to provide a range of services depending on clients’ individual health care needs, including post-surgical, postpartum, baby care, wound care, elder care and meal preparation.

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Originally from Alexandria, Virginia, just outside of Washington, D.C., McNamara Bohlin began her nursing career in 2009 as a labor and delivery nurse. She went on to become a medical-surgical nurse and worked in orthopedic nursing before moving to a position as director of medical surgical nursing and orthopedics director of operations at the Anderson Orthopedic pre-surgical clinic at Inova Mount Vernon Hospital in Alexandria.

In 2017,  McNamara Bohlin moved to Steamboat Springs, where she took a position as the director of nursing at Casey’s Pond, a local senior living community.

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When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, she moved back to bedside nursing, working in an on-call role while she pursued a Master in Business Administration. Last year, she added an MBA to her bachelor’s degrees in nursing and in marketing and communications.

She is hoping to combine all of her talents with Blue Skies Nursing, and she is working with three other nurses on a contract basis to provide in-home services for her customers. As the business expands, McNamara Bohlin said, she will sub-contract with other nurses with hopes of meeting even more her clients’ needs.

“The services that we’re providing right now range from baby care to elder care and anything in between,” McNamara Bohlin said. “The hope is that because we have so many nurses with different specialties and talents, and wants and needs, that we will be able to find places for everyone to fit in.”

She also hopes to find nurses in the community who are looking for opportunities to pick up a side job and it wouldn’t have to be the same work they’re doing at their other job.

“My hope is that they would be able to pick up clients with Blue Skies Nursing on the side in order to kind of feed their own nursing needs,” McNamara Bohlin said. “For example, say you’re in elder care, but you really love babies.”

At the end of the day, McNamara Bohlin said the goal at Blue Skies Nursing is to fill gaps in care, whether that’s after a patient leaves the hospital following an operation, caring for a baby or mother in the days after the baby’s birth, or providing elderly care that family members may not be able to offer.

McNamara Bohlin said the best way to contact Blue Skies Nursing is through BlueSkiesNursing.com, where clients can view services and packages or schedule a consultation.

“I’ve always wanted to have my own business. I like to be able to do nursing the way I want to do nursing … having that companionship relationship with that person and giving them quality of life instead of just going in for five minutes and taking blood and walking out,” McNamara Bohlin said. “I want to be able to have a company where nurses enjoy doing nursing, and that has fallen out of fashion.”