Continuing to Care
Volunteer nurse program allows former RNs to keep doing what they love — working with patients.

By Julie Chyna
December 13, 2004

Sally Rundquist, RN, BS, loved nursing. She loved it so much, in fact, that when she retired after more than 40 years in the profession, including 25 years as a nurse manager, she wanted to continue caring for patients.

She looked into the volunteer programs at her former employer, St. John’s Mercy Medical Center in St. Louis, but didn’t find anything that met her needs. “There were a lot of jobs that volunteers could do, but none of them were satisfying to me as a nurse,” Rundquist says. “Then I realized that if I wanted to volunteer my time and nursing skills in a meaningful way, I probably wasn’t the only one out there.”

With the help of a grant from the hospital’s auxiliary, she developed the St. John’s Mercy Medical Center Volunteer Nurse Program. After beginning with five volunteer nurses, the program has grown to 18 volunteer nurses, most of whom volunteer four to six hours a week, in the two years it has been running. Although most of the volunteers are retired, a few are nurses who left their staff positions to stay home with young children. Rundquist is now a part-time paid employee for the hospital and oversees the program as a clinical supervisor.

Ready to serve

Each volunteer nurse must attend a three-day orientation and competency refresher class, which is offered at no cost to the volunteers. Rundquist conducts the class herself, with guest speakers from the hospital Volunteers must also maintain a current RN license; CPR certification; JCAHO’s mandatory requirements; and any additional requirements necessary to work in certain units, such as intensive care and labor and delivery.

St. John’s volunteer nurses may also attend seminars and in-services if they want to gain additional skills. The in-services are staff-development programs offered at St. John’s. If there is an off-site seminar that they want (or need) to take, the hospital will pay for them to attend, as it would for a regular employee. Rundquist says it’s a way to repay the volunteers for their service.

The volunteer nurses also have the freedom to choose the hospital department in which they’d like to work. That sort of flexibility is one of the elements that Judy Pitlyk, RN, BSN, really enjoys about volunteering.

“I love being able to give basic patient care again,” says Pitlyk, who left nursing when she had children. “With this program, I can do it on my own schedule and choose where I want to be. I can make a difference, but without all the responsibility or time commitments of a staff nurse. Being a volunteer nurse has been an even better experience than I expected.”

Although the volunteer nurses cannot dispense medication or provide other clinical services, they still provide hands-on care. For example, they can bathe patients and help them with other daily living activities; conduct hospital room orientations, in which they introduce the patient to any roommates and show them how equipment in the room works; and collect patients’ medical histories as part of the admissions process. But perhaps one of the most important tasks they perform is serving as a friendly ear to patients who are worried, frightened, or lonely.

“As much as staff nurses would like to be able to spend extra time one-on-one with a patient, they just don’t always have that option when they’re caring for all of their other patients,” Rundquist says.

Sharing the caring

Rundquist’s program has been such a success that she presented it at the annual conference of the American Society of Directors of Volunteer Services. Following that September event in Atlanta, a number of hospitals contacted Rundquist for more information about starting similar programs.

One such organization was St. Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, N.J. “A staff member here saw the conference presentation, and when I first heard about it, I thought, ‘There’s no way we can do this,” says Lorraine Marino, RN, volunteer liaison at St. Barnabas. “But once I heard all the details about how it works, I thought, ‘When can we get started?’ Sally has been very generous about sharing information and materials to help us get our program off the ground.”

With the support of the administration and the nurse executive council, Marino and Diane Poulios, the nurse recruiter in human resources, have spent the past year-and-a-half developing a volunteer nurse program for their organization. They plan to launch the program in January.

“We probably could have been done faster, but we did a lot of research before we began recruiting and putting together our orientation,” Marino says. “It’s been a real collaborative effort between the hospital’s volunteer program and the human resources department.”

The volunteer nurses at St. John’s have been able to provide significant assistance to staff nurses, but Rundquist says she is proudest of the way they have provided additional support to patients and their loved ones.

“A couple once came into the emergency department and learned that the husband had a recurrence of cancer that had been in remission,” Rundquist says. “Of course, his wife was extremely upset, so the physician asked for a volunteer nurse to come talk to her. The wife spent a long time discussing her worries about her husband’s cancer. When she realized how long it had been, the wife said, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t want to keep you,’ and the volunteer nurse was able to say to her: ‘You are my job. No one here needs me more than you right now.’ That’s the sort of thing that makes this program worthwhile.”

Julie Chyna is a freelance writer based in Illinois.