Take a look at holistic nursing care and the unwavering compassion and commitment by nurses in the field of Hospice and Palliative Care nursing. I got the chance to talk with this month’s featured get-to-know nurse, Pamela Johnson. Pamela is a certified Hospice and Palliative Care nurse and Director of Clinical Services at Odyssey Hospice in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I asked her about what drew her to a nursing career focusing on end-of-life care.

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Pamela:    Basically, I have decided, I think, in Junior High School, to volunteer at a community hospital that wasn’t far from my home. I did that once or twice a week. I went all over the hospital. I was in a pharmacy. Then I got to go up in the nursing unit and watch the care that nurses be giving help in little ways but not that much but I really enjoyed watching the interactions between patients and the nurses and thought, “I can do this.” I thought I can go and make a difference. That experience shaped my drive, I guess, to be a nurse. My parents really wanted me to go to college and I was “No. I wanted to go to nursing school. I wanted to go out there and do it as soon as possible.” I did go to nursing school and did that two-and-a-half-year program. I graduated and went right to a Med-Surg unit.

I did that for about six months. Then I went to the Emergency Room. I was really kind of driven to do all that high-tech stuff in the emergency room. I did helicopter service for a little bit. I worked in a trauma unit for some time too. Then I ended up in critical care. I watched the way patients die without their families and with little support and nobody really talked about what exactly what’s going on with that patient or the family. I just didn’t think that was the right way for things to happen. As it turned out, I was a newly-married and my husband had a heart attack. He ended up giving me all the young patients that had MIs, those were young guys, and talking to their wives about how to deal with somebody young that’s having a heart attack. Some of those patients would die. I was just having a hard time with it and decided that I think that it was time for me to go into something different, so I started to do home care. Hospice was first talked about and I got to go along with the nurse who was seeing a hospice patient. I thought, “This is it. This is really what I am supposed to do.”

Jamie:    It’s funny how you fall into it. You were involved in such a broad range of nursing care, really looking for that niche that fits you. You get to that one thing. It’s amazing how it clicks.

Pamela:    It did. It did for me.

Jamie:    What’s one of the things you find most gratifying? I think a lot of people look at hospice care and all they can see is death and dying. But there’s really so much more to hospice care. I think, first of all, that it’s care.

Pamela:    It is care. I think that I didn’t make these bad situations that this patient or this family find themselves in. I didn’t make the cancer or whatever that problem is that that patient and family are experiencing but I can make that situation a little bit better. I can help them figure out what their goals are because it really isn’t about me so much as it’s about them and what they want and talk about quality of life. A lot of times people haven’t been talking about quality of life. When you could help them – and it’s not just me, I don’t want to say that – it’s a team. It’s working with the chaplain. It’s working with the social worker. It’s working with the Home Health Aide that helps with that person’s...