A Hospital for Ashe County by Janet C. Pittard

Author:Janet C. Pittard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Published: 2015-11-17T00:00:00+00:00

Charlotte Caddell Thompson, R.N., Interview (Telephone, January 19, 2015)

Charlotte Caddell Thompson is part of the future in nursing. I talk to her right before her weekly 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. shift, which she works from her home. Charlotte is employed with a health management company, based in the Triad. Her patient load or membership assigned is approximately 400. She has never met any of them face to face and never will; she tracks their status via telephone. Some of her patients are on the other side of the country, and those are the ones she is contacting on this once-a-week 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. shift, to accommodate the West Coast time difference. The rest of her work week, Tuesday through Friday, is 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. With two sons, 10 and 15, this is a happy marriage of work and family, and, Charlotte assures, “They know to be quiet when I am on the phone.” She communicates with her coworkers via email, and they share their individual expertise on cases that require some brainstorming. They just don’t do it sitting at a conference table, passing around a box of doughnuts and wearing scrubs.

But it wasn’t always like this, and Charlotte probably would not be as good at her job now if she had not worked her way up in a more traditional medical environment. In 2002, while she was still an L.P.N. and working on becoming an R.N., she joined the staff at Ashe Memorial Hospital, starting off as a hall nurse on the second floor, the medical surgical floor. When she graduated as an R.N., she went to Watauga Medical in Boone for about two years, in the intermediate care unit and pediatric unit. Then it was back to Ashe Memorial, now as an operating room nurse, cross-trained in Mountain Hearts and x-ray. During her six years as an operating room nurse, AMH, in a collaborative effort with Appalachian State University, offered some of the nursing staff the opportunity to bump up their credentials to a bachelor of science degree in nursing. Eight or ten signed up for the program and were in the first class to graduate from the program at ASU. It was a good way for a working mother to continue her education, because class started right after the shift ended, and it was conducted at the hospital, so the students did not have to move their cars.

During her second tour of duty with AMH, when Charlotte was an R.N. and working in the OR, she had the opportunity to work with both Doc Jones and his son, Dr. Charles Jones. Having been born and raised in Ashe County, she was well aware of the Jones family legacy. She remembers Doc as quiet and soft-spoken and very serious about his job. “He was a very wise man. Sometimes during a surgery he would step away from the operating table and think through the mechanics of what he needed to do, working out his next move.

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