Rachelle Cronkhite knew she wanted to be a nurse in her senior year of high school. Now a nurse for the past 40 years, she specializes in providing home health care through Gentiva Health Services.
“I thought I could help people,” she recalls of her decision. And she was right. As a home health nurse, Rachelle provides care to patients of all ages and with many different kinds of health issues. She enjoys being in the home health industry for many reasons, including the flexibility in hours, working with different types of patients and their varied conditions and seeing patients improve in their home environments.
She typically visits between five and eight patients a day and provides them with such services as dressing changes, wound care and disease education. Other daily responsibilities include supervising staff, performing patient-care-related paperwork and making calls to patients’ physicians and other members of the caregiver teams.
It’s often a demanding job. The nature of the business requires a nurse to have a great deal of empathy and understanding as she may often be working with chronically or terminally ill patients. This type of nursing is not an 8 to 5 job, and, because of spending necessary amounts of care time with each patient and driving to different locations, the nurse must accept the fact that her day may not always run on schedule.
What words of advice does she offer to someone considering a career in home health nursing? “Be prepared to work with all kinds of people and to be committed. You need a sense of humor. You need to like animals and understand that you will be working in many different types of homes. And you must treat everyone of your patients with kindness and dignity.”
But the rewards far outweigh the inconvenience. Rachelle enjoys working with her patients; she appreciates their willingness to accept and work with their illnesses. And she admires their joy in life even when their conditions will not improve. Of course, she revels in their progress. When she arrives home after a long day, she feels a great deal of satisfaction. And she knows that she has done the best she can for her patients. “That is what counts the most,” says Rachelle.
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