Page 38 - BusinessWest 2023 Healthcare Heroes

HEALTHCARE HEROES OF WESTERN MASSACHUSETTS
A Passion for Patients
A quick look at the typically full parking lot at the VA’s Springfield CBOC, which stands for community- based outpatient clinic, testifies to the need for the services it provides, from laboratory and pharmacy to primary care and behavioral health.
“From what I have learned as the spouse of a VA nurse manager, it seems that, while most of these workers could get paid more elsewhere, they stay with the VA because they are passionate about caring for our veterans, and they are energetic about supporting each other in this difficult, important work,” Ben Quick wrote in nominating his wife for the Healthcare Hero recognition.
Yet, nursing wasn’t her first career. After graduating from college, she worked briefly in human resources, found she didn’t like that career, and went back to school for a nursing degree.
“Coming out of nursing school a little bit older than the typical students, I kind of took the first job that I could get,” she recalled. “I had a small child, so I didn’t want to work hospital hours, even though I loved the idea of being in the hospital, so I went to work for a pediatrician.”
Which surprised her, considering
that her nursing-school rotations caring for youngsters tended to make her cry because she didn’t want to see them hurt or sick.
But as a pediatric nurse, “I loved seeing the kids grow over the years, seeing new babies born into families, working with parents on all kinds of
am I doing the right thing?’ I said to one of my friends, ‘but I love my kids so much here.’ And she said, ‘you’ll find new patients in a while.’ And I did.”
In doing so, she’s taken to heart Abraham Lincoln’s famous quote that the VA — established 65 years after he uttered it — has adopted as a sort of
pivot to virtual appointments more quickly than other organizations.
For instance, before the pandemic,
“I had a patient who needed monthly monitoring for medication he was on, and he liked to travel. So we would do video visits, and we would have a set appointment to do the follow-up for his medication, wherever he was. So we already all knew how to use this,” she recalled.
And when COVID struck, “we very quickly pivoted to using video for several months, almost exclusively.
A lot of our patients did not want to come to the clinic. Nobody wanted to go anywhere. And we already had this in place.”
Their concerns were warranted,
as the pandemic hit the elderly population hard in the earliest days of the pandemic. “As you can imagine, a large percentage of the VA population is elderly. I had a father-son set of patients — and the son was 74. So a lot of them, being elderly and therefore immunocompromised, were scared, but the VA already had this amazing video platform, and we had already trained everybody how to use it.”
Meanwhile, “the nurses that I worked with were coming up with great ways to rotate the staff through the clinic so that we could spread out more to allow for that social distancing and masking
in a more comfortable way,” Lefer Quick explained. “And we took on new providers and new nurses, even during the pandemic. We didn’t slow down much.”
Cutting-edge Care
In his nomination, Ben Quick boiled his pitch down to three thoughts:
the VA’s quality of care is second
to none, downtown Springfield has
a busy medical practice devoted to healing America’s heroes, and the workers there are humble, passionate, professional patriots. “That’s a Healthcare Hero story that everyone needs to hear,” he wrote.
And now they will.
“The VA is the best employer I’ve ever had in my entire life,” Lefer Quick said. “They value creativity and innovation, and they support us to explore that.
“We really are on the cutting edge,” she added. “The people I work with
are doing amazing things and love to
be there. No matter where they are,
in Springfield or any other part of this country, if someone is eligible for VA care, they really ought to look into it.” n
“
I think there’s more of an awareness of mental-health
needs in general in healthcare right now. And certainly,
veterans who have seen combat are going to nee”
d support afterward. So that’s part of our mission.
different diagnoses to help their kids,” she recalled, and her next move was born of wanting to keep caring for children. “Working in the public schools was a way to be available for my son while also reaching a big population of kids. And I loved it.”
So Lefer Quick felt torn about leaving pediatric care for the VA.
“I remember leaving the public-school job for this, and I was very, very excited, but I had this moment of, ‘oh my gosh,
mission: “to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow, and his orphan.”
“One of the things that almost kept me from accepting the detail to nurse manager was all my patients,” she said, but she understands that all her roles have been supportive in some way: “supporting kids and their families, supporting students at school to be optimally healthy and ready to learn, supporting our veterans, and now supporting the nurses who provide that care to veterans.”
Some of that care is behavioral and substance-related. “We recognize the need for that integrated care for our veterans. I think there’s more of an awareness of mental-health needs in general in healthcare right now,” she noted. “And certainly, veterans who have seen combat are going to need support afterward. So that’s part of our mission.”
She said the VA has felt the strain of a nationwide nursing shortage as much as any other facility, but added that the nurses who take jobs there value the mission President Lincoln put forward — and many are veterans themselves, or come from a strong military family, or are drawn for some other reason to caring for a veteran population.
“That was how I talked myself
into the manager position. I thought, ‘well, if I can be a manager with my background, already doing this job, I can support these nurses, which ultimately provides better care for the veterans.’ So I’m not just doing it for my team; I’m helping every single team.”
The COVID pandemic posed challenges across the spectrum of healthcare, but Lefer Quick said the VA was uncommonly prepared for it, as
it had already implemented a remote monitoring platform called VA Video Connect, so VA facilities were able to
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