Nursing was Always the Dream

Linda Knodel, ’03, always wanted to be a nurse.

“I remember seeing nurses at church wearing their white uniforms and nursing caps. When I was in fourth grade, I did candy striping and cared for a woman who was 103 years old. I would feed her, and the nurses would tell me that she wouldn’t eat for anyone but me; she would wait all day until I got there,” she said.

Knodel has been a nurse now for about 49 years. She began her career at St. Alexius in Bismarck and progressively took on more and more leadership roles — running the medical staff office, starting the home care division, running the medical records office, and more.

While she was serving as the chief nursing officer at St. Alexius, they decided to pursue Magnet certification for the hospital. Knodel began looking at the standards and saw that one of the criteria was that the chief nurse has a bachelor’s or master’s degree in nursing, which she did not have.

Fifteen months later, Knodel and a group of her colleagues graduated with their master’s degrees in nursing, and a year later, St. Alexius achieved Magnet status.

Eventually, a recruiter called her about an opening in St. Louis with the Sisters of Mercy. She took
the opportunity and began the Magnet certification process there. Three years later, she was offered a position in their corporate office. In that role, she spent five years as chief corporate nurse for 44 hospitals.

“Everything was going great, and I was thinking I would retire in that role, but then I got an offer to move to California and be the chief nursing executive over 64,000 nurses with Kaiser Permanente.” She ended up accepting the opportunity and spent the next four years in California as senior vice president, chief nursing executive, overseeing nurses from coast to coast and all the way down to Hawaii.

“We’re all connected,” she said. “You never know whose life you are touching, and at St. Alexius it felt like we were a part of something bigger. And that’s because of the Benedictine values and the legacy of the Sisters — they came into this community and served.

Although Knodel technically retired from Kaiser Permanente, she does not view herself as retired. However, now that she isn’t in a full-time role anymore, she is looking forward to spending more time with family, especially her husband and grandchildren.