Melony Murray, DNP ’25, on How “The Pitt” Influenced Her Final Project
Melony Murray, DNP ’25, poses for a photo outside UPMC Children’s Hospital. (Mick Stinelli)
Melony “Mel” Murray, DNP ’25, started pursuing her Doctor of Nursing Practice degree because she wanted to prove to herself that she could do it.
She also wanted an affordable program that could be done asynchronously on her computer. That’s why she came to Chatham University.
“Through a lot of my schooling, I’ve done online coursework, and this by far was the best,” Murray said during an interview at the coffee shop in UPMC Children’s Hospital, where she works as a programmatic nurse specialist.
“If I had any issues or had any questions, all I had to do was shoot my professors an email, or they were willing to jump on a phone or video call at any time,” she said.
A native of Monroeville in the eastern suburbs of Allegheny County, Murray was raised by a mother who was a nurse for 40 years. Don’t go into nursing, her mother told her. Murray listened, even if she didn’t heed her mom’s advice.
“She always said she wished she had gone further, and she wished she had the higher degrees to be able to advance,” Murray said. Her mother, an oncology nurse, worked at the bedside until she retired.
“I was at the bedside for 10 years, and I saw what it did to my mom,” Murray said. “I wanted to do all the amazing things she did but take it further.”
After completing nursing school, Murray first spent one year as a staff nurse at UPMC Mercy Hospital, after which she moved to Children’s, climbing the ranks in the emergency department, eventually becoming a unit director. She started her current job in 2024.
That’s the same time she started in Chatham’s DNP program. “All of the schools I’ve gone to in my career have been local. I didn’t want to go to some big for-profit university and just be a number for a money maker.
“I wanted the best experience, and that’s what Chatham was going to give me.”
The best part of the program, Murray said, was being able to build her final project piece by piece over the four terms she was at Chatham. “You look back at everything, and you’re like, oh my gosh—I put this whole thing together and it was one, cohesive, process,” she said.
And the program’s faculty not only helped Murray hone her professional skills, but they helped grow confident in her understanding of the material.
“I cannot talk enough about the professors in the DNP program at Chatham,” she said. “In meetings, I’m asked to provide ideas. They’re so much easier, better in quality, and I’m able to articulate them.”
Her project was on mass casualty incident (MCI) response in the UPMC hospital system, which has locations not just in southwestern Pennsylvania but also in western Maryland, central Pennsylvania, and even the Republic of Ireland.
UPMC Children’s Hospital, located in Pittsburgh’s Bloomfield neighborhood, is the only level one pediatric trauma facility in the tri-state area, Murray said. The emergency department sees some 80,000 kids every year.
What she found, though, was that the department’s MCI plan hadn’t been updated since 2016. Murray saw that as a great opportunity for her project.
Her final project consisted of an educational plan for nurses and functional exercises (or “mock drills” as she called them). After completing the exercises with her Children’s Hospital colleagues, she saw an increase in their knowledge about how to respond to MCIs. She also made sure nurses were able to complete the exercises in under 10 minutes.
That plan was put to the test this past August, when an Aliquippa School District bus full of students crashed after, news reports say, the bus tilted over a hill side while navigating a turn. Twenty students were sent to Children’s to be evaluated for their injuries.
“When we get words that a mass casualty is happening and might come here … they reach out to the nursing staff, and there are certain individuals who are assigned to be zone leaders,” Murray said. “They immediately know they are to go to our mass causality room, they are to grab their bins that I made, and they take them to their zone.
“That’s what the project was geared towards, those nurses, so they could set up quickly and help the responders coming from other places.”
And if seeing her work in action wasn’t enough, it also gave Murray the opportunity to rub shoulders with some Emmy-winning celebrities. When the cast of the hit medical drama The Pitt visited Children’s in September to honor the hospital staff, Murray got the chance to speak with Noah Wylie, the show’s star and executive producer.
Murray poses for a photo with Noah Wylie of The Pitt. (Courtesy of Melony Murray)
“In that moment, I told him a few things. One, huge crush on Dr. Carter,” his character in the show ER, she said. “Then, I told him I really appreciated how they portrayed everything on The Pitt, the mass casualty episode specifically. I was able to draw from that … and the way they presented everything in those two episodes, and I was able to apply that to my project.”
“You could tell he felt a sense of pride” hearing how the show impacted her work, Murray said. “I think it was a full-circle moment for both of us.”
Even without the star-studded encounters, Murray still thinks she has a great job, going to emergency departments around the tri-state area, speaking to nurses, and helping them help their patients.
“I wouldn’t be where I am now, growing my program, continuing my project, with the huge network I have, without Chatham,” she said. “The education I got at Chatham, with the professors— they gave me the understanding and tools to truly be successful for the rest of my career.”
Learn more about Chatham’s DNP program, which affords nurses the ability to develop advanced competencies in their own clinical specialty areas, at chatham.edu.