“As a patient access representative in the admitting office, I am usually the first person the family comes in contact with when entering the hospital. For this reason, I feel it is my responsibility to make their difficult and emotional time as easy and painless as possible. Basically, I treat every patient and family who I encounter as if they were my own family.”

“Being a Hematology/Oncology nurse for 38 years doesn’t make you hardened or unemotional. I still cry with families. We can’t always control their outcome, but if I can make their time a little bit better while they are here, then I have done my job. I wouldn’t trade my job for anything.”

“A lot of people try to say that health differences are because of your genetics. But what we find when we look at the data is, your health is more defined by your zip code than by your genetic code. That’s what we don’t want to be the case. My focus has always been around how we make the population’s health better. How we close those gaps.”