Sandy Gilmore works with seniors who have to choose every day whether to buy all their medicines or spend a little extra for healthy foods. Usually they rely on boxed mac and cheese, white bread and dollar-store candy, but Gilmore hopes her new training will help her be a little more convincing.
Gilmore and 10 others finished their training Saturday to become Pittsburgh Mercy Health System's newest parish nurses. The professional nurses finished four days of training designed to help them use their medical expertise to serve their faith communities.
"In order to totally take care of somebody, you have to know how to take care of them spiritually, and you have to know how to pray with them," said Gilmore, 55, of Sewickley, an outreach nurse for seniors at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. "All of that gives them hope."
Parish nursing started nationally in the 1980s. The idea is to connect church members with nurses in their own communities. This way, they can confide in and get information from someone familiar, said Dorothy Mayernik, manager of Mercy Parish Nurse and Health Ministry Program.
The nurses usually offer blood pressure screenings and health ministry programs in their churches, she said. They also use spirituality to improve care, said Esther Gass, a program consultant who was one of the first seven nurses Mercy hired in 1991 when it started the program in the Pittsburgh region.
One of her most memorable cases came in the next year when she met a grandmother who was recovering from a stroke. Her grandchildren were scared of her because she couldn't talk or move as she had, Gass said. She encouraged the children to hug their grandmother and read to her; then she prayed with the whole family.
"They looked at her like 'oh, she's still Grandma,'" said Gass, 70, of Penn Hills. "That was powerful to me to see those children react."
Though not all are active, there are 3,500 parish nurses registered in Mercy's program, Mayernik said. Mercy commissioned 53 this year, and nurses in the program are volunteers, Gass said.
Mercy has had about two groups of trainees each year since it formalized training about 10 years ago. But it added a third group this year to meet demand: Courses always have been full in recent years, Mayernik said.
"Anytime we're in the newspaper ... people pick up on that and call us and say, 'I never knew there was such a thing,' " she added.
Although the Mercy system is run by the Catholic Sisters of Mercy, the program is open to members of other faiths.
The next trainee course is scheduled for March 4 and 5 and April 1 and 2. The cost is $395 per person. Interested nurses can call 412-232-5815, e-mail parishnurse@mercy.pmhs.org or visit the website www.pmhs.org for more information.
