Hospice News

Verona RN Receives Gold Medal Status for Hospice Care

Essex County, NJ -- Mary Murray, RN, a former journalist, found her real calling when she became a nurse for the Barnabas Health Hospice and Palliative Care Center in West Orange. “I really love it,” says Ms. Murray, who recently received recognition for Gold Medal status in the 2009 Family Evaluation of Hospice Care (FEHC) survey which is awarded to employees who are most often cited by family members via comments on the survey. This is the second time that Ms. Murray, a Verona resident, has been honored with the Gold Medal. Her upbeat approach has obviously made an impression on hospice patients and their families.

“We come to people when they have exhausted all their treatment options,” Ms. Murray said. “I’ve always approached this work as there’s always something else we can do for you. We may not be able to cure you, but we can offer you many things to make this time a little bit easier.”

Ms. Murray believes that many people in hospice care come “with a lot of dread and fear,” but hospice can make that difficult time easier, and families wind up thanking hospice for helping “them through what often is the worst experience of their life,” she said.

Ms. Murray keeps all the thank-you notes that families have sent her and hospice over the years in a drawer. “I very rarely look at them,” she says. “But I love to know that they’re there. One of the things that I’ve learned in this job is that you really don’t know how much you touch people’s lives just in your day to day, work world.”

She is also moved when a patient’s survivors ask that funeral donations be sent to the Barnabas Health Hospice and Palliative Care Center. “That says to me that we really moved them, we really helped them,” Ms. Murray said. “For them to be able to think of us at their hour of grief, sitting there with the Funeral Director, means the world. That is, I think, the best tribute anyone can give us. ”

The Barnabas Health Hospice and Palliative Care Center is an affiliate of the Saint Barnabas Health Care System.  For more information, please call 973-322-4800 or visit www.barnabashealthhospice.org.

Date: August 4, 2010

[ top ] [ back to News Index ]