Q&A Part III: Ida Pitts, burn nurse
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| On their first day in the new outpatient burn unit at Community Regional Medical Center after moving from University Medical Center, staff members said it was a smooth transition. |
Pitts has been a mainstay at central California’s only burn center since, and says that’s where she’ll stay “until the body says no more.”
Now settling into her new digs at the new Leon S. Peters Burn Center in Community Regional Medical Center’s new trauma critical care building, Pitts says she continues to see new things on the job.
Pitts and her coworkers in the outpatient burn unit made the move from UMC to Community Regional April 11. Staff members said the transition was smooth after caring for 11 patients on the day.
The rest of the burn services are scheduled to move April 16 as Level 1 trauma, pediatric and acute inpatient services from UMC follow the next day to the downtown academic regional medical center.
During a hectic schedule of moving and setting up equipment and supplies, Pitts took a few moments to reflect:
How do you feel about this move?
I love the idea we’re moving into something brand new, upstate, more modern.
What are you most looking forward to about moving to the downtown Community Regional Medical Center?
Giving our patients the privacy and the best care that they deserve.
What worries you about the move?
Just all the little details that are involved. It gets a whole lot more complicated than just picking up and moving. You’ve got to let people know that you’re moving and where to go.
Before, they always knew just come to the burn center on the first floor, and over here we have to kind of show them a map of here, you go around here, and then you go up to the fifth floor. Just trying to make sure we have all of our supplies together, all of the secretarial stuff. It’s like starting from scratch.
We hear a lot about UMC. Tell us, what is so special about it?
I think UMC has been the best trauma critical care building that you could ever go to. It’s the only Level 1 here in the Valley.
If you needed to have major surgery after a motor vehicle accident, that was the place to go. If you had a large burn, you couldn’t want any place else to go. None of the other hospitals kept their burns nine times out of 10. We got them a couple days later because they couldn’t handle it. So if they came to UMC first, they couldn’t get better care.
How will this UMC move enhance what the people from UMC can do?
The people who made the Level 1 trauma center are moving to Community Regional. So it will be the Level 1 trauma center. We’re still giving them the same care, it’s just we’ve changed our locality. We’re still going to give them the best care possible.
We’ll have the heart surgeons at Community Regional, we’ll be able to do open-heart surgeries whereas UMC didn’t have the open heart, so we’re actually expanding what we were able to do before, with more modern and up-to-date equipment.
What will be the toughest part of this transition?
Getting in the car and going to Community Regional rather than UMC. I get in the car, it’s automatic pilot, I’m supposed to go straight on Cedar, I’m not supposed to turn on Tulare. So it’s getting into the habit of going to Community Regional rather than UMC, that, for me, is going to be the hardest part. Otherwise it’s going to be a joy.
If I’m a patient coming to this bigger than ever regional medical center, what can I expect?
Caring staff, the best care possible, the most up-to-date techniques in taking care of their burn wound or whatever the problem is and as much support as they require.
What does it truly mean to be an academic regional medical center?
It has always been very important to me to be part of a teaching program. If we do not try to invoke into our new nurses and our new doctors how to take care of their patients in a loving and caring manner, with the most up-to-date things, they’re going to go out into the world not fully prepared to give the care that is required by their patients.
How important does Community Regional now become to the Valley?
Extremely important. There are a lot of doctors who are here in the Valley now who got their training at University Medical Center. I know of several of the surgeons who are currently doing surgeries at Community Regional, Clovis Community, Selma Community Hospital, Saint Agnes even, who got their initial training at UMC.
So we have had a great impact on their training and where they stand today. There are several of those doctors that I actually will go to or have my family go to because I think that they got excellent training and they are wonderful physicians.
Give me your best UMC story.
It is too hard to give you any one story, but one of the ones that I have been thinking of is, we used to have tubs in the treatment room. And when the residents finished their rotations through burns, and in the old days they would actually be there for four months at a time, there were no breaks, they didn’t have two months and then go to another area, they would be there for four months. They became part of the family.
And, at the end of their residency, we would fill up one of those tanks with water, sometimes ice, sometimes bubble bath, depending on the physician, and when the doctor least expected it, several of the staff would gang up on that person and throw them into the tub.
One of them, they went to go put the doctor into the tub, and they didn’t realize until afterwards that he had been a champion or second place runner-up in college wrestling. He did not go into the tub, the nurse went into the tub instead. Another doctor, he ended up going up on the window sill trying to get away from the people to avoid going in the water, but he ended up going in the water anyway. That was their baptism, their graduation present.
This story was reported by Eddie Hughes. He can be reached at eddieh@communitymedical.org.