ER nurse Melanie Park has seen an increase in the number of visits to hospital emergency rooms by people experiencing homelessness. She blames the lack of homeless shelters in the Plant City, Florida, area.
Despite the challenges, Park has been doing her best to assist these patients and was recently recognized by HCA Florida Hospitals with a humanitarian award for her efforts.
Daily Nurse is proud to name Melanie Park our Nurse of the Week for her humanitarian work to aid Plant City’s homeless.
Park, a Plant City native, has been working as an ER nurse for 40 years. She has recently expanded her work beyond the HCA Florida Plant City emergency room, helping give homeless patients necessities after receiving medical care.
She calls the project “Mel’s Closet,” which Park launched after giving a patient new shoes six years ago.
“Her shoes were held together with rubber bands,” she recalls. “She was excited. She walked out straighter and with pride.”
‘Mel’s Closet’ is stocked with men’s, women’s, and children’s clothing, which Park uses most of her money to supply.
After retirement, she plans to focus on Mel’s Closet full-time.
“It makes you feel good to make people feel good,” she says. “I was born in Plant City. This is my home. I want to make it a better place.”
If you’d like to donate items to support ‘Mel’s Care Closet,’ contact HCA Emergency Department Manager Derika Graham. ‘Mel’s Closet’s’ greatest need is socks and men’s and children’s clothing. Donations should be new items with tags.
Nominate a Nurse of the Week! Every Wednesday, DailyNurse.com features a nurse making a difference in the lives of their patients, students, and colleagues. We encourage you to nominate a nurse who has impacted your life as the next Nurse of the Week, and we’ll feature them online and in our weekly newsletter.
If you call this woman Intrepid, you are merely being accurate.
When a retired WWII nurse saw her 100th birthday approaching, she decided to celebrate by engaging in a (terrifying) new learning experience while simultaneously helping people… Because that’s just how some nurses roll.
A couple of years ago, after a neighbor went skydiving, Nurse of the Week Raymonde Sullivan was intrigued. We do not know whether the British-born retiree recalled Parachute Nurse, a film released back when she was a WWII frontline nurse, but something made Sullivan decide to pick up the classic “bucket list” line item and take a literal leap into her next century. However it was, the Florida resident decided that a skydive was just the ticket: “I had never done it, and I’ve done a lot of things in 100 years so I thought I must do it while I can.” 
There was more to it than that, of course. Sullivan tragically lost a daughter to motor neuron disease (the best-known form being Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, which is also known as “Lou Gehrig’s Disease”), so she worked with the Motor Neurone Disease Association of South Australia to make her birthday challenge into an opportunity to raise funds and awareness for research into a cure.
And what a challenge! Sullivan went through her lessons and on her birthday this May, she made the astonishing jump with her neighbor – in freefall at speeds up to 120 mph, while dropping at 200 feet per second. The game retiree seemed to agree that paratroopers earn every cent of their hazard pay. Describing the experience with British understatement as “scary,” she made it clear that she has no plans for a repeat performance (no doubt to the great relief of her family and friends).
Sullivan might have found the experience more frightening than she had anticipated. The tiny centenarian looked almost petrified as the time neared for her jump (a viewer might feel similarly; the adventure does indeed look “scary”). Having lived through the relentless bombings of the Battle of Britain, though, it was easy for the newbie para nurse to place her fears in context. When her turn came, the petite English nurse kept a stiff upper lip and did her late daughter proud.
After a sad and distressing holiday weekend, we can all do with something uplifting—or peacefully down-drifting. So, without further ado, here is a video showing a terrified-but-impossibly-brave woman who remains undaunted as an instructor tucks her under his arm like a plush toy and leaps out of a plane (note how happy fellow passengers are to see someone else go first):
As the nurse staffing shortage in the Tampa Bay area is nearing crisis proportions, Florida nurse educators, hospital administrators, and health care officials met to confront the problem and plot a course of action.
A spring 2021 survey by the Florida Hospital Association (FHA) found that one out of four registered nurses and one out of three critical care nurses had left their jobs in the previous year. It also noted a 25 percent turnover rate, the highest over the past several years, and a projected deficit of 59,100 nurses in Florida by 2035. The Sunshine State is the third-largest employer of nurses in the country (second only to California and Texas), but the Florida Center for Nursing (PDF) latest projections suggest that by 2035, there will be a 12% drop in the number of actively employed RNs. Seniors are especially vulnerable to the crisis, as the Center anticipates a 30% shortfall of LPNs if the state doesn’t move to produce more nurses.
The issue is particularly critical in the Tampa Bay area on the Gulf coast, so the St. Petersburg College (SPC) College of Nursing recently gathered more than 50 regional stakeholders – including leaders from hospitals, education institutions, nursing associations, and government officials – to brainstorm solutions to reduce the decline.
Louisiana Louis, DNP, Dean of SPC College of Nursing
Stakeholders agreed on some specific action plans as well as general aims during the resulting session, Taking Action to Address the Critical Nursing Shortage in Tampa Bay. The meeting was hosted by St. Petersburg College, Pasco-Hernando State College, State College of Florida in Manatee County, and Hillsborough Community College.
Dr. Louisana Louis, MSN, DNP, Dean of SPC’s College of Nursing, observed, “Everyone has been having solo discussions on how to address the nursing shortage. This allowed us all to be in one room. It had not been done this way before, and that made all the difference.”
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, job growth for nurses in Florida is expected to grow by 21 percent, while 40 percent of nurses will approach retirement age in the next decade. Stressful working conditions caused by the pandemic are also creating an increase in turnover.
“In the middle of 2021, we asked hospitals to report vacancies and turnover,” said Cheryl Love, RN, Chief Clinical and Patient Safety Officer at Florida Hospital Association. “Overall, there was an 11 percent RN vacancy rate in Florida over 12 months, which is higher than the national rate of 9.9 percent. We need to add more (nurses) than a couple thousand per year to mitigate the projected workforce shortage.”
Stakeholders identified key challenges in need of solutions:
To address these issues, participants set out a series of action plans, and SPC is already pursuing some of these ideas:
A gift last year from the Hough Family Foundation is allocated to enhance the college’s nursing simulation area so students get hands-on training to mirror situations they would see in a live clinical experience.
SPC College of Nursing Dean Louis remarked, “Another focus is getting more nurses out into the community. “We are creating a special cohort in the summer for students who were not successful in their last semester to give them another opportunity to graduate early,” she said. “And we are working on implementing an evening and weekend program within the next year, which will produce more nurses.”
Justin Senior, CEO of the Safety Net Hospital Alliance of Florida, added, “These needs require a thoughtful, all-encompassing approach to educating, training, recruiting, and retaining Florida’s present and future nurses. We are confident that by addressing the nursing pipeline through investments in nursing educational and training programs and in nursing schools that we can avoid nurse shortages and strengthen the state’s healthcare delivery system.”
The FHA/Safety Net Alliance report also recommends that the state expand nursing schools and clinical training capacity, increase the number of nurse faculty opportunities, improve pass rates of the nurse licensing exams (at present, NCLEX pass rates in the state place it in the bottom ranks nationally), and take advantage of the robust influx of people moving to Florida by increasing funding for recruitment of nurses from outside the state.
Florida nurse Duane Kelloway is the Man Who Broke the Bank at… Seminole Hard Rock!
We need lucky nurses more than ever, so maybe our Nurse of the Week‘s jackpot last Saturday will rub off on our readers. OR nurse Duane Kelloway works at St Joseph’s Hospital in Lutz, Florida. With the state struggling under the Delta variant surge as well as the—let’s call it Florida-ness—that can astound even hardened natives, the 50-year-old nurse was very much in need of an R&R break.
Like most nurses, Kelloway has been seeking healthy ways to shed the stress and burnout that may be joining the stethoscope as an integral part of the average nurse’s uniform. After a summer of working overtime to treat Covid-19 patients, Kelloway says, “We thought we were heading on the downturn and now all of a sudden we’re back in the mess again.” Then, last week, his wife Kelley (also a nurse) convinced her husband that Saturday was the best night for a venture into Tampa to enjoy an evening off at the casino. The Kelloways got their longed-for R&R, a break—and much more—while playing the 2-cent machines at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino.
As Kelloway was blowing off accumulated steam at the slots, apparently his “one-armed bandit” had a sudden crisis of conscience. “I was spinning, spinning,” he told Tampa’s Channel 8. “Then, I [came] across the ‘Wild Wild Wild Wild’ box and I was like, ‘Oh my god! I just hit the $2,000 jackpot!” But it didn’t end there.
The $2,450 he won on the machine nudged the casino’s total 2021 slots payout past the $1 billion mark—and no casino worth its salt allows any milestone to pass by unnoticed. The managers told Kelloway, ”I could either get 10 times my jackpot—which would’ve been $24,000—or, they [would give me] this 2022 X7 BMW worth $112,000. I about fainted.”
His decision did not require much in the way of “Let’s Make a Deal” type deliberation; Kelloway went with the New Car.
The prize boosted his mood even before he had a chance to test drive it. “I thought I was going to pass out,” he recalled. “To be so lucky to be here at the right time and the right place and at the right machine.” (Thanks to Kelley’s sharp sense of timing; Duane had initially wanted to go out on Friday). The 2022 BMW represents a significant upgrade for them: that night, the Kelloways had driven down to Tampa in a 2013 Taurus.
Duane and Kelley Kelloway drove home last Saturday in an unusually snazzy new Nurse-Mobile: a 2022 BMW X7.
But Kelloway is not likely to embark on a major gambling spree.
”It’s a release. It’s an escape. It just gets you away to decompress for a couple of hours.” And it does sound a lot more fun than simply buying lottery tickets.
We hope that the Fla surge winds down soon and that Duane Kelloway, RN, and Kelley Kelloway, RN get the most out of their new wheels. For more on Kelloway’s win, see Florida CBS stations Channel 6 or Channel 8.
Darius Fulghum—like so many of our male Nurses of the Week—seems to enjoy complaining about the toughness of a BSN program. “Getting my degree is probably the hardest thing I’ve done,” he told Sky Sports, in the halcyon pre-pandemic days of 2019. “I’m going to the Olympics, and I’m still saying it was hard.”
Covid-19 collided with the 6”1” 201-lb boxer’s Olympic dreams, but he’s now making a splash as a promising pro. His BSN, though, still ranks as one of his proudest achievements.
The Texas-born Fulghum was already an outstanding wrestler when he decided to major in nursing at Prairie View A&M University. How did he end up in a program as academically demanding as a BSN? “I started getting serious about my health and being fascinated by the human body and learning about it, and that’s how I got more into science;” nursing seemed to follow naturally. His father (a graduate of Florida A&M; most of the family are HBCU alums) was the one who first suggested nursing. Fulghum says: “My dad was the one who pushed me into it. When I was in high school, I didn’t really know where I wanted to go, but he said they really need men, and it’s a good profession. It’s never stagnant. You always have something to do. The fact that you can help people is the most rewarding thing.”
As a military brat, Darius was well-prepared for the demands of nursing as well as athletics. Of his father, he told the Prairie View A&M blog, “He is the most disciplined guy I know and he made sure that we learned.” And somehow, Darius not only kept up with his BSN studies, he also trained so effectively that he won the Golden Gloves in 2018, the year before he graduated.
In 2019, when Fulghum graduated and passed his NCLEX, he had expected to store his pin in mothballs when he aced his Olympic trials and trained in preparation for Tokyo. When Covid hit, it was a painful blow (no pun intended, and we promise to make no facetious references to knocking people down and being able to patch them up afterwards).
As a boxer, though, Fulgham has had plenty of experience with making himself get up after being knocked down. Will he exchange his boxing gear for hospital PPE at some point? He’s not sure. But, if anyone is ever in need of medical assistance at a Darius Fulghum match, they will be in good hands and we might see him as a Nurse of the Week again one day.
For more on Fulghum, PVAMU, and his story, see the below video or see this article.
In North Carolina, the nation’s leading tobacco producer, any adult who has smoked more than 100 cigarettes in their lifetime can now be vaccinated against covid.
In Florida, people under 50 with underlying health conditions can get vaccinated only if they have written permission from their doctor.
In Mississippi, more than 30,000 covid vaccine appointments were open Friday — days after the state became the first in the contiguous United States to make the shots available to all adults.
In California — along with about 30 other states — people are eligible only if they are 65 or older or have certain health conditions or work in high-risk jobs.
How does any of this make sense?
“There is no logical rationale for the system we have,” said Graham Allison, a professor of government at Harvard University. “We have a crazy quilt system.”
Jody Gan, a professional lecturer in the health studies department at American University in Washington, D.C., said the lack of a national eligibility system reflects how each state also makes its own rules on public health. “This hasn’t been a great system for keeping, you know, the virus contained,” she said.
The federal government bought hundreds of millions of doses of covid vaccines from Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson — as well as other vaccines still being tested — but it left distribution largely up to the states. Some states let local communities decide when to move to wider phases of eligibility.
When the first vaccines were cleared for emergency use in December, nearly all states followed guidance from the federal government’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and restricted use to front-line health workers and nursing home staffs and residents.
But since then states have gone their own way. Some states have prioritized people age 75 and older, while others have also allowed people who held certain jobs that put them at risk of being infected or had health conditions that put them at risk to be included with seniors for eligibility. Even then, categories of jobs and medical conditions have varied across the country.
As the supply of vaccines ramped up over the past month, states expanded eligibility criteria. President Joe Biden promised that by May 1 all adults will be eligible for vaccines and at least a dozen states say they will beat that date or, as in the case of Mississippi and Alaska, already have.
But the different rules among states — and sometimes varying rules even within states — created a mishmash. This has unleashed “vaccine jealousy” as people see friends and family in other states qualify ahead of them even if they are the same age or have the same occupation. And it has raised concerns that decisions on who is eligible are being made based on politics rather than public health.
The hodgepodge mirrors states’ response overall to the pandemic, including wide disparities on mask mandates and restrictions for indoor gatherings.
“It’s caused a lot of confusion, and the last thing we want is confusion,” said Harald Schmidt, an assistant professor of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania.
As a result, some Americans frantically search online every day for an open vaccine appointment, while vaccines in other states go wanting.
The assorted policies have also prompted thousands of people to drive across state lines — sometimes multiple state lines — for an open vaccine appointment. Some states have set up residency requirements, although enforcement has been uneven and those seeking vaccines are often on the honor system.
Todd Jones, an assistant professor of economics at Mississippi State University near Starkville, said the confusion signals a need for a change in how the government handles the vaccine. “The Biden administration should definitely be thinking about how it might want to change state allocations based on demand,” Jones said. “If it does become clear that some states are actually not using lots of their doses, then I think it would make sense to take some appointments from these states to give to other states that have higher demand.”
Jagdish Khubchandani, a professor of public health at New Mexico State University, said no one should be surprised to see 50 different eligibility systems because states opposed a uniform federal eligibility system.
“Many governors don’t want to be seen as someone who listens to the federal government or the CDC for guidance,” he said. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has boasted of ignoring the CDC advice when he opted to make anyone 65 and older eligible beginning in December.
“There is a lot of political posturing in deciding eligibility,” Khubchandani said.
To be sure, governors also wanted the flexibility to respond to particular needs in their states, such as rushing vaccines to agricultural workers or those in large food-manufacturing plants.
Jones said the decision to open vaccines to all adults in the state may sound good, but Mississippi has one of the nation’s lowest vaccination rates. Part of that is attributed to hesitancy among some minority communities and conservatives. “It’s good news everybody can get it, but there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of demand for it.”
Jones, 34, was able to go online for a shot on Tuesday and was vaccinated at a large church a short drive from his home on Thursday morning. “I was very happy,” he said.
Published courtesy of KHN (Kaiser Health News), a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.
