At 16, Megan Stidham, FNPC, CNP, RN went to play the piano for hospice patients and their families and found her vocation. “My parents made me volunteer. I wasn’t too keen, but then I went and fell in love,” she said.
“I’ve worked in almost every area of hospice. There are so many things that hospice nurses can do in the continuum of care,” said Stidham. She’s worked as a nursing assistant, nurse and most recently as a nurse practitioner and nurse case manager with Visiting Nurse Health System.
Unlike many nurses who come to hospice as seasoned professionals from other specialties and settings, Stidham came to the field early in her career.
“I’ve developed my own way of helping families understand and get through the end-of-life process to experience a more beautiful death by watching how other hospice nurses and doctors do it. In hospice, you work closely with a team and I learn from my team every day,” she said. “I can’t imagine doing anything else that would be more rewarding for me.”
What matters in palliative care is having a heart for helping dying patients and their families, said Denise Lukow, RN, IBCLC, nurse manager for Aberdeen Place Hospice. “In this field you have to be very self-directed, highly-skilled and compassionate. If you’re looking for a vocation where you can make a difference, this is it,” said Lukow. She likes knowing her patients by name, as well as their histories and family situations. “We see people first and get to connect as human beings. The diseases are secondary.”
With patient utilization and research about hospice’s effectiveness growing, she wishes that more nurses could learn about this field in nursing school. “Nurses need to know that this is another career opportunity for them to explore, one that will use all their skills and character. It would be great to have more male nurses in the field,” she said. “We’re not here to hurry death, but to support patients and their families so that they can have a good quality of life for as long as possible. It takes strong clinical skills, character, and a willingness to teach.”
Lisa Pritchett, RN, BSN, CHPN, an inpatient nurse manager for Embracing Hospice Care in Atlanta, can remember changing the catheter on a patient early in her career and finding it full of blood. She knew she had to talk to the family about bladder cancer. “You never know what you’ll be called on to teach. You have to have the confidence to roll with family needs. They are depending on you and trusting you to know what to do,” she said.
These days Pritchett is sharing her knowledge with more young interns from local nursing schools. Nurses who can hardly say the word death are seeing how challenging and rewarding hospice care can be. “You know you’re making a difference in this work. You can see it in people’s faces.”
