On a semi-recent trip to The Garfield Innovation Center (@KPGarfield), I asked Marilyn Chow, RN, PhD, FAAN Vice President, National Patient Care Services (@InnovationChow) about the nurses who were pictured on the walls of the Center and whose names adorned the innovation spaces. She said I could actually meet them, and so, we had lunch.
Deana Medinas, Clair Lisker, Deloras Jones, and Phyllis Moroney are graduates of the Kaiser Foundation School of Nursing (KFSN), which was open from 1947-1976, and graduated 1065 health professionals.
They didn’t know as much about Kaiser Permanente, the health system when they chose KSFN. They knew the Kaiser Foundation School of Nursing was ranked #1 in California when they came to learn. And then they practiced and helped build Permanente Medicine, including the creation of all of us.
This story is similar to mine – I knew that training in family medicine was top rated in the Permanente residency that I matched into. It’s dissimilar to mine because there were numerous studies published of the success of this program by the time I left medical school.
Clair Lisker was a student of Dorothea Daniels, who was the first administrator of Permanente Foundation Hospital Los Angeles, in 1953, and then administrator of Kaiser Permanente San Francisco. Phyllis Moroney was the first Nurse Practitioner in California. Deana Medinas became the Medical Group Administrator for Kaiser Permanente Hayward.
There’s a beautiful new sculpture devoted to the KFSN on the grounds of the brand new Kaiser Permanente Oakland Hospital that I promised I would go see before the end of the day.
My colleague Vince Golla (@VinceGolla) allowed me to turn a meeting about the future into a meeting about the future by going to see the sculpture as promised.
Most human beings encounter nurses in their life journey. Permanente physicians like me are trained by nurses in our life journey. My feeling is that to know where you’re going, it’s important to know where you came from, and usually you find people who live in the future, too.
[miniflickr photoset_id=”72157676010838806″]