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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

Holy Cross Nurse Leading Effort to Relieve Shortage

Honoree – Nursing Advocate Linda Coale, R.N. Providence Holy Cross Medical Center Linda Coale, working with a local college and charitable foundation, had developed an idea to address one of the most serious crises in health care, the nursing shortage. Hospitals are forced to pay much higher rates for traveling nurses than they would for hospital-based nurses. When she found out how much it would cost to get a new program off the ground, however, she thought the plan was doomed. “When I found out we needed $1.8 million, I thought ‘Oh my,'” Coale said. “Especially with all the hospitals in today’s day and age struggling to meet their bottom lines.” Coale, the chief nursing officer at Providence Holy Cross Medical Center, found it less difficult than she had at first anticipated to get hospitals to cough up their share of the funding, though. Now, starting in January 2005, the Associate Degree in Nursing Regional Collaborative is expected to enroll 70 to 100 more nursing students in a two-year pilot program. Six of seven participating hospitals are contributing $100,000 each over three years. Together with $400,000 from the Weingart Foundation, $615,000 from the Annenburg Foundation and $122,151 from the Foundation of the National Student Nurses Association, the new student nurses will use teleconferencing to complete classes remotely and do lab work at local hospitals. Because of a high rate of attrition among nursing students during the first and second year of studies, the ADN Collaborative nursing students will take empty second-year spots in local colleges to finish their training. Coale said that while some hospitals are working with local colleges on similar programs, none of them are as large as her program. “We feel that this is probably the most innovative one to help meet the nursing shortage,” Coale said. “There are advantages for the hospitals involved,” she added. “If they have any employees working at the hospitals that are on the (nursing school) waiting lists, these employees get the first option to get into the (collaborative nursing program).” Coale was born and raised in the Valley, and her career started at Providence St. Joseph where she volunteered as a candy striper before attending nursing school at St. Vincent’s College of Nursing in Los Angeles. She earned a bachelor of science in healthcare management from the University of La Verne and a master’s degree in Business Administration from Pepperdine University. The Finalists Ann Dechairo-Marino Northridge Hospital Medical Center Health care runs in Ann Dechairo-Marino’s blood. The daughter of a surgeon and a registered nurse, it comes as little surprise that Dechairo-Marino has rose to prominence in the same world. Currently, the senior vice-president of patient care services and the chief nurse executive at Northridge Hospital Medical Center, Dechairo-Marino has increased patient satisfaction at the facility, as well as the amount of nurse-physician collaboration. “I’ve tried to establish an environment where we can improve the nursing practice, improve the amount of education, set standards and lead in the field of nursing. I feel my biggest success has been my understanding of the importance of relationships,” Dechairo-Marino said. Active in health care at a young age, Dechairo-Marino started working in a nursing home directly after her high school graduation. The following summer she returned home from college to work as nurse aid/unit secretary at Palomar Hospital in San Diego. Inspired by her experiences, she decided to transfer from Cal Western University in Point Loma to the nursing program at San Diego State. After years of schooling to hone her craft, Dechairo-Marino feels that her passion for learning has aided her success. “The seven-year journey to obtain my Ph.D in nursing helped me to become more knowledgeable and more humble at the same time. The more I learned the more I realized what I did not know. I believe the science of nursing is important, but it is the caring that makes such a difference to our patients. Caring is the essence of being human and the essence of nursing,” she said. Jeff Weiss Beverly Bent, R.N. West Hills Hospital and Medical Center Beverly Bent has traversed the world from Europe to Africa and Asia as a nurse caring for those who need health care the most. Bent’s compassion for fellow human beings derives out of her upbringing in Michigan during the Great Depression. Further, she was motivated to study nursing because one of her children was born with cerebral palsy. Bent began working at West Hills Hospital in 1982 and, as the hospital’s president and CEO wrote in 2003, “I am proud and happy to say that she has never left us since that day.” Well, Jim Sherman isn’t precisely right. The truth is, Bent has left the hospital for Ukraine after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, India, Romania, Dominican Republic the list goes on. Most recently, Bent was in Ghana in West Africa, working at a small hospital that doesn’t have phones or electricity. Sherman certainly understands Bent’s meaning to the hospital and to mankind, too. “Beverly’s humility is apparent when you meet and speak with her,” Sherman wrote in the four-page nomination letter. Slav Kandyba

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