Nurse
Assignment: USA
I am a nurse at a Federally Qualified Health Care Center in the inner city of Pittsburgh. We have expanded from 2 to 3 medical sites over the past few years. We have two dental clinics as well. We serve roughly 12,000 patients within the East Side of Pittsburgh. Our mission statement is: "To witness to God's love, known in Jesus Christ, by empowering our patients through community-centered, whole-person quality health care for all, which includes those who are uninsured, underinsured and underserved."
As a nurse, I room patients for a doctor, respond to requests for drug refills, do prior auths, keep up with my assigned doctor's faxed documents, doing nurse visits (simple patient visits like bloodwork, tb plants, or ear flushes that don't require the expertise of a doctor) and answer the nurse triage line. We pray every day as staff before we start the day.
Our patients love to come to us. They say they feel like they are completely taken care of. It's the prayer at the end of the visit, they say. Really, it's the prayer at the beginning of the day, the prayers while I am rooming them (I pray for them while I am taking their heart rate!), and THEN the prayers with the doctors and nurses at the end of their visit. We spread the Good News every chance we get.
My doctor, Dr. David Hall, averages 21 patients a day. He generally works at least 3-4 days/week, so we see somewhere between 63 and 84 patients a week. In addition to this, when I am not working with my doctor, I take an average of 84 phone calls per day while talking on the nurse triage line. When working in the lab (nurse visits, bloodwork for office visits with docs), I can see about 12 patients a day. With all of these taken into consideration, a conservative estimate of patients I see or interact with weekly is about 250.
If it were not for the MedSend Grant, I would not be able to work at East Liberty Family Health Care Center. My patients require a special touch, someone who will endure past their anger and hurt to listen to them to the things under their anger and hurt so that we can most effectively serve them in helping them achieve the most maximal health.
