An indispensable resource

Beth Israel Deaconess nurse aids patients and staff

Assessing a patient's condition while caring about them as individuals is second nature to Benedetti. (Richard Schultz)

HONOREE: Gail Benedetti

It's a rainy Saturday morning, and outside Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, the city is just beginning to stir. Inside the quiet hospital, as patients awake and the clock slowly ticks toward 6:45 a.m., Gail Benedetti is getting ready to start her 12-hour shift on the ninth floor of the Farr Building, a medical/surgical unit.

She's at the nursing station early, checking in with the night staff, reading patient charts, and reviewing staffing needs. As a resource nurse, Benedetti not only has a patient caseload, but she also manages staff development and nursing assignments, a situation she describes as "getting the best of both worlds, enjoying patient interaction but also sharing my expertise with other nurses." On this busy floor, Benedetti and other members of the team care for patients who are recovering from gallbladder or appendix removal, pancreatic surgery, bariatric bypass, or other procedures. "Each patient is different in terms of how they progress post-op," says Benedetti, who has been a registered nurse for 18 years. "No two are the same, and that's what makes nursing so challenging."

Benedetti works closely with unit educator Elizabeth Carvelli, as both combine their long experience and expertise to provide support and guidance to other nursing staff. Their teamwork allows them to deal with both crisis situations and everyday episodes, from a patient who is having trouble breathing to a wound that won't heal. "To see Gail in action is hard to put into words," says Carvelli. "She'll step in and know who to call and what treatments to do. She'll stay rational even in stressful situations when someone is screaming at her."

As a resource nurse, Benedetti helps brainstorm solutions and problem solve clinical issues. She remembers one patient who had a tracheotomy and also suffered from chronic back pain and couldn't get comfortable in bed. His feeding tube required him to remain in an upright position, but this only aggravated his back.

"His nurse came to me and said, 'What else can we do?'" says Benedetti. "I had worked in a vascular unit where we positioned patients by tilting the bed up while keeping the mattress flat, and suggested we try that." They went into the room, adjusted the bed, and the re-positioning worked. "The sense of relief on his face was quite touching. He was comfortable." With some illnesses extending hospital stays for weeks or months, it's easy for nurses to develop strong relationships with patients.

Even after the haze of surgery, one patient, who loved landscape design, shared tips about plants and shrubs with Benedetti, a welcome distraction from the endless probing and poking after recovering from pancreatic surgery. Benedetti became so close to the family of another patient, who received a liver transplant, that she became like an adopted daughter and has remained so after the man passed away. She even still remembers her first patient, back in 1990, a man struggling with heart disease, who spent eight months at the hospital. "It's a privilege to care for people and watch them as they progress. It's amazing how patients and family can pull together during such a difficult time."

Benedetti says it can be tough juggling the difficult tasks she needs to do, from overseeing the flow of the unit to checking in with clinical advisors, but it's important to have a sense of calmness when you walk into a patient's room. Assessing the patient's condition while caring about them as individuals, is second nature to her now. "You take it in all at once, anticipating problems and issues while looking at vital signs and trends; checking IV fluids, pumps, catheters, and drains, and just doing a once over on everything in the room to get a bigger sense of what's going on."

It's the details that count, says Benedetti, and co-worker Carvelli agrees. One snowy winter day, when many of the nurses couldn't make it in because of the icy roads, Benedetti arrived, bagels in hand, for her fellow nurses. Later, she ordered pizza, making sure that morale stayed high, even though the storm raged outside and staffing was limited.

At the end of the day, when the clock on the wall finally shows 7:30 p.m., Benedetti drives back home to Norwood, where she'll go to the gym, out to eat, or garden in the yard. As she digs around her shrubs, she remembers, it was one of her patients who helped her figure out what to plant.