Balance: Care Close to Home
Work Life Balance Recognized
By Megan Rowe - Photo credit: Kay Taylor

Top: RN Cindy McMillan, clinical director of UVA Augusta Dialysis, enjoys the bonds she forms with dialysis patients. Bottom: RN Ellen Shields updates a bulletin board at Augusta Dialysis with UVA nursing news as RN Cindy McMillan looks on.

Fishersville, Va., is about a 30-minute drive from Charlottesville and the University of Virginia Medical Center — just far enough that registered nurse Ellen Shields was getting tired of the long drive over Afton Mountain every day. She had worked at UVA for 14 years, but she and her husband had fallen in love with Augusta County and the Shenandoah Valley, loved the slower pace and the rural setting, and so they’d bought a house there.

Fortunately for Shields, there was a compromise available. The UVA Health System provides renal care throughout central Virginia via several dialysis centers, including one at Augusta Medical Center in Fishersville. Shields transferred there and hasn’t looked back. “I still like the idea of being connected to the main hospital,” she said. “But this really works for me.”

Registered nurse Cindy McMillan, clinical director of the Augusta clinic, agrees with Shields. McMillan worked at Augusta Medical Center for about 20 years before switching to the UVA clinic. “It was a big attraction for me that I could work for the university, still live in Augusta County and not have to drive over that mountain.”

Shields and McMillan are two of UVA’s 1,900 nurses who work at a dialysis clinic owned by the UVA Health System but located outside of Charlottesville. The other clinics are in Amherst, Orange, Lynchburg, Page County and Zion Crossroads. The nurses’ reasons for opting to work so far from the main hospital vary, but they all agree that they love dialysis and are dedicated to their patients who must devote 12 hours a week to the life-sustaining procedure.

“I like dialysis,” said RN Connie Hall, who worked at the Lynchburg clinic before transferring to Augusta last year. “It’s something concrete, something I can get my hands on, one area to focus on versus working on a floor.”

The Lynchburg and Amherst facilities serve five counties, according to RN Connie O’Dell, manager of the Lynchburg facility. Besides providing hemodialysis, Lynchburg also prepares patients to do peritoneal dialysis in their homes. For hemodialysis, patients typically come to the clinic three times a week, four hours each time.

“It’s like a job for the patients. They’re giving up three days a week just to live,” O’Dell said. But her nurses like seeing the same patients again and again. “They really get to know the patients.”

However, the nurses don’t always get to know other UVA nurses. Since the clinics are all at least a 30-minute drive from the UVA Medical Center, the relationship with UVA is something of a long-distance one.

UVA’s Professional Nursing Staff Organization (PNSO) works to bring UVA to these nurses. Shields acts as a liaison between the organization and her co-workers at Augusta by emailing and calling frequently, encouraging the Augusta staff to apply for UVA’s nursing awards and updating two PNSO bulletin boards in her clinic. The bulletin board has photos of PNSO leaders from hospital events. And at UVA, Shields and McMillan’s pictures are on placards around the hospital, beside the message, “We recognize our everyday heroes, the nurses of UVA.”

During Week of the Nurse at the beginning of May, nurses who work at the medical center brought a superhero-themed “Mighty Magnetmobile” to the outlying clinics.

The Magnetmobile was born last year, when the hospital was seeking Magnet designation from the American Nurses Credentialing Center. To raise awareness, PNSO leaders brought Magnet information, hospital trivia questions and games to each unit of the hospital and all of UVA’s clinics. “It was successful then, so we just thought we’d resurrect it and use it again,” said Walter Mason, the PNSO’s 2008 president-elect.

Mason and his wife, UVA RN Rebecca Mason, brought the Magnetmobile to the Amherst and Lynchburg dialysis clinics, where employees answered superhero trivia questions and played a ball-toss game for prizes. “It was great,” he said. “We really enjoyed it. It seemed like the employees who were there appreciated it too. We played some games, had some fun, chatted with people that we’d never met and just generally tried to let them know that we appreciate the hard work that they do.”

Employees from UVA Renal Services, which includes all of the dialysis facilities, visit the clinics frequently. RN Cathy Husser, who has worked at Lynchburg for 29 years, recalls when UVA acquired the facility in 2004. Typically, new UVA employees must undergo an orientation in Charlottesville; but instead, UVA employees went to Lynchburg.

“It was wonderful to have people come down and help us through that time period,” Husser recalled. Since then, she has made friends with other UVA renal nurses and turns to them when she has questions. “In order to really form bonds with people, I like to have a face,” she said. “It’s so nice to have all those contacts to call people, ask their opinion and just to collaborate on whatever the issue may be.”