Jana Braklow
Olathe Medical Center
Medical school at Creighton University, in her home state of Nebraska, was almost a foregone conclusion. Almost. Then Jana Braklow heard a nurse speak at a recruiting fair in Kansas City, “and she gave the best speech I’ve ever heard about nursing,” Braklow recalls “I went home and told Mom and Dad I was going to Creighton to be a nurse—they were shocked.”
But there’s no question in her mind that Braklow made the right choice. During a career that has included stops in Nebraska, Iowa, St. Francis Medical Center in Topeka and, since 2007, Olathe Medical Center, Braklow has honed her skills as a critical-care nurse practitioner. That niche appealed to her, she says, because “I’ve always been a problem-solver and a person interested in research and evidence-based medicine.” Critical care, she says, requires you to problem-solve, and you see immediate results from the interventions you do—what’s working, what’s not. She also enjoys the cross-functional aspects, working with most every other health-care discipline in the hospital.
“But what I enjoy most is that it reminds me to be a human being first and a nurse second,” she says. “That connection you make with a patient and their family—I’m seeing them on perhaps their worst day. My hope is to make things better to help with recovery or, if a patient is dying, knowing that I am part of a memory for that family. Making that connection and being there at that time, when they need me, is really rewarding.”
And that med-school itch? “My dad, even to this day, will say I’m not too old to go back,” Braklow says. “But I’m the one giving baths or working 12-hour shifts, carrying out the orders, and getting the chance to really talk to patients. Who would be there if I weren’t there?”
Mary Beth Fisher
North Kansas City Hospital
For Mary Beth Fisher, nursing isn’t just business. It’s personal. “On my mom’s side of the family, there is a prevalence of Type 1 and 2 diabetes, as well as gestational diabetes in every generation, so I have been around the effects of the disease,” says Fisher, a nurse practitioner at NKC Hospital who specializes in such cases. Her emphasis on that started, she said, when her mother—herself a nurse—was a patient there in 1988. “I had just graduated with my master’s in nursing and wasn’t really looking for a job,” Fisher remembers. During a hospital visit, her mother started bragging to another nurse about her daughter the graduate. “The nurse handed me a job description about an open nurse educator position. Diabetes education was part of the position.”
Fisher was hooked. Part of her fascination with the illness, she said, is that “diabetes encompasses everything in the body including the heart, kidney—all systems.” It’s particularly fulfilling work, and she was drawn to it “because it’s the right thing to do,” she says. “Plus, I had great examples in my mom and aunt, who were nurses. Nursing takes skill and knowledge, and you can go in any direction. After 25 years in the profession, I have never been bored.” She hasn’t had time to be: A lot has changed with the technology of diabetes treatments in 25 years. “I remember when we checked blood sugar levels using a urine test that took several minutes,” she says. “By that time, the urine had already traveled through the kidneys and body so it wasn’t as accurate.” Then came chem strips and meters requiring small samples of blood. Faster, but no match for today, when “we need just a speck of blood that we run through a meter and get our results in seconds.”
Because of the rising incidence of diabetes worldwide, Fisher is at the fore of an emerging medical crisis. “Education and knowledge are so important in the fight against diabetes,” she says. “We need to dispel myths about the disease and look for ways to improve health disparities and access to care among all races.”
Meg Holloway
Shawnee Mission Medical Center
When the position of nurse navigator in the breast-cancer unit was created 10 years ago, Shawnee Mission Medical Center was something of a pioneer. And Meg Holloway was ready to explore that new frontier. “There really weren’t very many then,” she remembers. “The first nurse navigators were developed for hospitals serving very poor communities, where people had significant issues just meeting their basic needs.” But the challenges of cancer care are many—from diet to chemotherapy, from radiation treatment to plastic surgery—and the treatment matrix made that model a good fit. “Cancer care is very complex, so it’s wonderful to have one coordinator who is the patient’s advocate, working with all of those other disciplines,” Holloway says. “It’s a pretty amazing, innovative thing.”
Before landing at Shawnee Mission, Holloway had worked with patients of all ages, from birth to death, in diverse health-care settings. Those included a large university hospital, a county health department, a health-care non-profit and a community college classroom. “All of those experiences prepared me for my current practice with women facing a breast-cancer diagnosis,” she said. There’s a personal aspect, as well: “My family has a significant history of breast cancer,
so I have additional motivation to be exceptional in my work,” Holloway says. “I want every patient to feel nurtured and valued, just as I would care for my own family members.”
That’s why she considers it an honor to be part of a patient’s full range of treatment, “from the first moment a patient is called back for an abnormal mammogram, to sharing in joyful celebrations of survivorship.” In her office, she keeps a box filled with cards and letters of gratitude from those patients. “I’ve labeled this box, ‘Treasures,’” Holloway says. “What I treasure most through my work as a nurse navigator is the transformation I see in women as they tap into their own strength and healing. My job is simply to honor them and help open the door.”
Susan Matthews
NorthCare Hospice & Palliative Care
There are no life-affirming celebrations for having beaten cancer. Susan Matthews knows her patients are going to die. A case manager for NorthCare, she covers a four-county area, often logging 100 miles a day through Kansas City’s sprawling northern suburbs to care for terminally ill patients. In some ways, her choice for this line of work contrasts with the hopefulness that marked her own entry into nursing, which she thought had a sky’s-the-limit appeal in terms of personal and career growth.
“Then the moment it hit me the most was in ICU, and I was working on a patient I knew was not going to survive, but we still had do everything we could to bring them back,” Matthews says. That set her on a new course, one founded on the idea that sometimes, it’s not about the outcome; it’s about fighting the good fight, and helping others do the same. “There was a realization that sometimes, it’s time for them to go,” she says, “so I feel like I really get to make an impact not only on patients, but on their families and being able to walk with them on one of life’s most difficult journeys.”
There’s grief, to be sure. But there’s another side, as well. “The smiles, the hugs, the hand squeezes,” Matthews says. One in memory that does stand out for her involved one of the first patients she had as a hospice nurse. “She was a young girl, about the same age as me, dying of cancer, and she had a young child, and I remember thinking, ‘Oh, my gosh, I don’t know if I can do this.’ But by the time her case came to end, watching her embrace what was coming, how she prepared for it, how she prepared her child for it, it was amazing. Being able to be a part of that, and the different levels you get to see in the people who go through that almost daily, it really is just amazing.”
Violet Warren
Cass Regional Medical Center
Early on in her nursing career, “I always thought that—I know this sounds totally stupid—I thought that I could defeat death,” says Violet Warren. But more than two decades later, and especially after rising to nurse manager for the Emergency Department at Cass Regional, Warren has learned a few things. “I’ve learned that, Number One, there are worse things than death,” she says. “And Number Two, there is often a peace in someone’s passing. But if there is an end of life and it’s my touch that’s the last they feel or my voice that’s the last they hear, I want them to be comforted; I want them to know it’s OK to go, that I’m right there with them and am there for their families to ease that.”
In ER work, there are more wins than losses, but even amid the loss, she says, “I’m just made to connect with people and do anything I can to ease their road, whether they’re getting well or passing.”
Nursing, she says, has given her opportunities she’d never have experienced in any other line of work. She’s made the most of them at Cass Regional, which has witnessed long-term, sustained growth as Kansas City’s suburbs have pushed south, bringing more bodies—and mayhem—into Cass County. “I won’t deny it’s been a little more difficult in a bigger building,” Warren says. “At first, when we moved in, we were all so focused on trying to figure out how to make bigger departments and more patients work.” But three years after the new hospital was built, “we’ve kind of worked out that process and flow comfortably,” she says.
Underpinning that success, she says, are hospital values, that make every member of the staff part of a family. “That’s so important, the root of who we are in this hospital,” Warren says. We have the goals of respect and excellence and all those, but it all starts with being a family and caring about each other.”
Cindy Jones
Heartland Regional Medical Center
When Cindy Jones was born, her grandmother—who never realized her own dream of becoming a nurse—put some money into a bank account to one day help fund young Cindy’s nursing education. “By the time I was 18,” Jones says, “it had matured … to $150.” Jones did indeed go to nursing school—she was in the last class to graduate from St. Catherine’s School of Nursing in Omaha, in 1970, and she worked in her native Nebraska until joining the private pediatric practice of Timothy Murphy in St. Joseph in 1990. He eventually sold his practice to Heartland Health, but Jones is still working with him, and last year, the hospital recognized her with its award for excellence in nursing. Her duties include meeting the needs of children at the Ten-Twenty Adolescent Clinic, a concept Murphy had advanced to focus on the kinds of issues that affect pre-teens and teenagers. “That group seemed to drop through the cracks with their issues of depression, anxiety and behavior,” said Jones, herself a mother of seven and stepmother of three. “One of the things we need to address more in health care now involves mental-health issues, and how we help parents with children who have issues like that, where do we hook them up with the right resources.” Although there are pronounced differences between patients at either end of that 10-year age cohort, Jones acknowledged, there are significant differences as well between those at the breakpoint between elementary education and middle school. “At age 10, you start to see them moving into settings with a larger group of kids, many of them older. There are issues with obesity, better nutrition, and counseling for parents who don’t know how to start dealing with the verbal aggression, defiance or wanting to become more independent.” And with the older group in that age range, she said, come issues of substance abuse, sexually transmitted diseases and birth control. So the patient load is varied and demanding—but ultimitely, rewarding. “I have watched the majority of patients we take care of grow up—the ones we treat now, I was the one giving baby shots to them, so I know the parents personally,” Jones says. “We have a connection.”
Volunteers
Geri Nicholas
St. Mary's Medical Center
Geri Nicholas answered the call to serve long before she pulled her first volunteer shift at St. Mary’s Medical Center in Blue Springs. Back in 1958, she started work as a nurse when the old St. Mary’s Hospital dominated the hilltop where the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City stands today, overlooking Downtown Kansas City.
She decided to hang up the white shoes in December 1992, but just a month into her retirement, her husband passed away. They’d raised four children together, so she knew all about family. So she went back to a place she considered part of her own. “The hospital had been my second home for so many years,” Nicholas said. A friend working at St. Mary’s told her how badly the hospital needed volunteers, “and I had the time,” Nicholas says. “I enjoy being around the medical field, and I get more out of it than I put in.”
The hospital’s volunteer-service records only go back to 2007, but in that span alone, Nicholas has logged 4,648 hours. If you ran that performance back to 1993, you’d be north of 15,000 hours of donated time. “I started out being a transporter, then went to the front desk at the front door, then they asked me if would consider working in the surgery unit. I work in the pre-op area, making up charts for surgery, and when I get those completed, I go out to the waiting room, answer the phone and communicate with visitors there.”
It’s only one day a week now, and the duties, she says, “are nothing spectacular.” But she’s part of something bigger at the hospital, and she’s witness to all manner of change that has visited her profession. “There have been so many,” she says. “I do think we worked harder back then. When I was retiring, we were just starting then to put orders through on the computer. I suppose that has maybe helped them some.”
Her favorite duties are close to her own roots: “I enjoy working back with the nurses,” Nicholas says. “I have contact with some of the doctors. But it seems more like I’m at home there. From 1958 to now is a long time, and I’m 85 years old, so I’ve spent so many years in the hospital, but I really enjoy that contact with other nurses and doctors.”
Jean Thompson
Olathe Medical Center
Think about this: A baby delivered in the neonatal ward on Jean Thompson’s first day as a volunteer at Olathe Community Hospital would be on the cusp of midlife crisis today. Now, 36 years and 13,500 hours of donated service later, she’s moving into something closer to full retirement—at the age of 90. And she can rattle off the many ways she’s made a difference at what is now Olathe Medical Center: “I’ve worked in the gift shop, the family surgery room, the patient-education department; I used to deliver the mail, I used to take the book cart around … but my favorite job, the one I’ve just been doing, is working at the information desk in the front lobby,” she says. “The public comes in and we see all these kinds of people that have so many interesting questions. It’s just nice to meet people and see them.”
If you’re into meeting new people, Olathe’s been the place to be over those 36 years, growing from fewer than 18,000 in population to more than 127,000 today. The community overall is considerably larger than the population of 3,200 it had when Thompson was born there, and the hospital has grown along with it, providing no shortage of need for her services. Those duties began as part of a group activity with her friends because it was an opportunity to get out of the house.
“I had several friends and we started volunteering together,” she remembers. “I always did like to work, but after I got married, I didn’t work, so it was nice to get out and help do things. We enjoyed being at the hospital, my friends and I.” For years, she worked two shifts a week, and at times more, subbing for other volunteers who couldn’t make it in. And in the years leading up to her last shift, she trimmed the workload down to a shift a week.
In 13,500 hours, you can rack up a lot of memories, but Thompson says the relationships are what she’ll take with her. “I just enjoyed the whole part, and got acquainted with so many people,” she says.
Ralph Long
University of Kansas Hospital
He always wanted to see the world, and he’s done that. Ralph Long has been to every country in Europe—except Norway—and he’s seen the Holy Land and the Nile River, and toured Australia, New Zealand and South America. But his life plan called for making most of those trips with Amelia Ann, his wife of 40 years until cancer took her away in 2000. After losing her, Long decided he’d devote more time to another post-retirement interest: volunteer work. And a logi-cal place to do that was at the place that had provided such good care for her, the University of Kansas Hospital.
He’s logged more than 11,000 hours at a place where the family connections run even deeper. “My daughter was a nurse there, our son-in-law was a doctor there,” he says, so it was a natural choice when he retired as men’s clothing buyer and worked his first shift in 1994. He’s pushed a lot of wheelchairs—duties that have subsided a bit with the hospital’s development of an in-house transportation program—but he finds his greatest rewards making the rounds to get patients their deliveries of magazines, mail and even printed e-mail messages. “Emails, they’re kind of funny,” the 84-year-old Korean War veteran muses. “Every now and then, a person will get a ton of those. I had one person, in one day, get 42 emails—and got into the 30s a couple of times with some others.”
Anyone who’s visited the sprawling medical center knows that finding your destination within the legacy buildings can get tricky. Long, though, has got that figured out, and he’s happy to assist perplexed visitors. Or move equipment back to its storage area after use. Or provide a push when an unexpected transport case pops up. “They asked me just today about transporting a woman who needed to get to X ray,” Long said. “I run into all sorts of things like that. I’m an active guy; I want to do volunteer work on my feet.”
Lifetime Service
Lynn Kindred
Mid-America Cardiology
Lynn Kindred’s father-in-law did more than help him pay for medical school, he set an example. “He was a physician in Emporia, where we grew up, and I really respected him and his colleagues. They did a lot of good things,” Kindred says. Family money helped cobble together an education, supplemented with a basketball scholarship to the University of Kansas—Kindred played with a fellow by the name of Wilt Chamberlain in the mid-1950s. After that, he set his life course by choosing cardiology as a specialization. “In those days, there were lots of diagnostic problems, with heart murmurs, rheumatic fever and that kind of thing,” Kindred says. “It’s different now, but the challenge then was trying to figure out what was wrong with the heart, and I liked the challenge of it.”
He went on to found a small practice in 1971, and it has grown into Mid-America Cardiology, which now has 37 cardiologists on staff. After years of being affiliated with Saint Luke’s, he aligned the practice with the University of Kansas Hospital in 2000. “That was a real satisfying venture for everybody,” Kindred says. “They promised to build a heart hospital, which they did. They gave us one of the best locations for patients to come right in off the front door to our office, and they brought four heart surgeons over too—there was not much surgery at that time. They kept all their promises, and I’m impressed with how things have gone at KU—the growth of the program, that it’s nationally recognized. I’m really excited about all that.”
One thing that hasn’t changed over the decades is the attraction he found from his earliest days of practicing. “I don’t do research, but I like the contact with the patients over the years,” he says. “I see a lot of them year to year, and get to know their families, too.” Among them is a man who arrived at the hospital after a heart attack in 1980. “I worked on him for about an hour, and had given up—I thought he’d died,” Kindred says. “But he woke up, and he’s still alive today. I see him every six months or a year, and I always remind him of that.”
Donna Osness
Lawrence Memorial Hospital
Donna Osness had a natural affinity for health-care work; both her mother and her grandmother were nurses. “I grew up fixing my dolls,” she remembers. “It was just something I always wanted to do.” But she had married Wayne Osness right after high school, and nursing schools then didn’t accept married students. Her husband’s emergency appendectomy years later found her in the right spot at the right time, and she overheard nurses talking about the new practice of allowing women into nursing school in Madison, Wis. “So I went back to school with five babies and a husband in graduate school,” Osness laughs. “But I finally got what I wanted.”
When Wayne took a job at the University of Kansas in 1966, she began a long relationship with Lawrence Memorial Hospital, starting in obstetrics. “It was a wonderful place to work, and I was able to work nights because of the children being in school,” she says. A second degree, in education, ultimately led her to the Shawnee Mission School District in an administrative position in health services, managing school nurses and the district’s health-education program.
It was part of a lifelong commitment to education, including her own. She earned her master’s and a doctorate in administration, and was the first person in Kansas to earn a degree in the emerging field of health education. Osness stayed with the school district for 18 years, but closer to her home in Lawrence, also served 12 years on the board of directors for her former employer, Lawrence Memorial. That role taught her much about health care from a new perspective. “I learned how difficult it is to manage a hospital, and all of the various parts of it,” Osness says. To provide the best health care for patients requires not just highly qualified doctors and nurses, but “managing the food service, research—there’s a huge budget, and you have to look constantly at what we can do to improve. You can’t rest on your laurels; unless you’re looking for ways to make things better, you’ll fall behind quickly.”
Raymond Lumb
Stormont-Vail Healthcare
Ray Lumb learned much about medicine at George Washington University and throughout residency and his fellowship in St. Louis and Ann Arbor, Mich. Then, in his first year of practice, he saw the real impact of compassionate care, treating a young woman who had, he says, “one of the most severe forms of rheumatoid arthritis I had even seen.” For 20 years, until she died, he treated her for every complication that disease could inflict. “Yet her positive attitude never faltered,” he recalls. “She taught me more about how to live, appreciate life and treasuring the opportunity to help others than anyone else in my life.” Nearly 40 years later, Lumb continues to find inspiration in both the patients and physicians he works with, along with the evolution of the hospitalist service—he had a hand in helping Stormont-Vail implement the first one in Kansas.
“The best thing about my job is the constant variety of challenges and opportunities to interact with physicians, employees, patients and the health-care system,” Lumb says. “There is always a creative solution to an apparent problem—it just takes some time and outside-the-box thinking.” He made headlines in 2010 when he testified at a legislative hearing against a proposal to close the Kansas Neurological Institute in Topeka, an act that revealed the depth of his commitment to patient care. “I could recognize that the propos-ed solution would not offer any real savings and would risk a significant deterioration in their care,” he says.
As retirement looms, he worries about the mismatch of physician supply and demand—and the cost explosion: “Providers are becoming overwhelmed with parameters of quality and we must have the assistance of the patient if we are to be successful,” he says. What’s needed, he says, is a national effort to promote individual health among parents and families, “and a realistic educational program on end-of-life care for patients and families.”
