Volunteer service brings comfort to hospitals, community

By Michael Davis
Norwich Guidon Staff Writer

Katie Davis volunteers at the Northeastern Vermont Regional Hospital, located in St. Johnsbury Vt., whenever she can.

"I work anywhere from two hours to 10 hours a day," said Davis, 18, a senior at St. Johnsbury Academy who lives in Passumpsic, Vt. "It's a good and friendly environment to be in."

Davis said she began volunteering at NVRH when she started going to St. Johnsbury Academy, and now, four years later, she states that she has worked over 200 hours of community service at the hospital.

The volunteer program at NVRH has people of all age groups working for them who want to get out and work in their community, according to volunteers at NVRH.

"We have all kinds of volunteers," said Joan Wollrath of St. Johnsbury, who is the volunteer coordinator at NVRH. Wollrath said that the age of NVRH volunteers range from teens to people in their mid-80s.

"If you were to walk into the NVRH hospital on any given day," said Davis, "you would not find one volunteer that doesn't enjoy the work that they are doing here."

Saglly Darrell of St. Johnsbury, a licensed nurse's aid and the ward secretary, said that the younger volunteers at NVRH are usually high school students. Saglly added that a lot of the older volunteers are retired, some even retired nurses, who come to the hospital and give their time.

An interesting aspect of the volunteer program at NVRH is the reason people volunteer their time to help out at the hospital.

Pauline Langlois, a volunteer at the NVRH gift shop who lives in Waterford Vt., said "I volunteer because I enjoy doing it." Langlois, like other volunteers at the hospital, is retired and just wants to help out with the community and be around other people.

Betty Fhatney of Lyndonville Vt., a part time cook at NVRH, said that for the older volunteers at the hospital, "it gives them companionship, so they're not alone or sitting at home all the time."

Other people at NVRH volunteer not just because it makes them feel good doing it, but because it's good to understand how a hospital functions.

"It's really nice to know the inner workings of a hospital," said Gail Roberts of St. Johnsbury, a volunteer at NVRH.

According to Wollrath, there are a lot of things that go on at hospitals that people don't know about until they've become involved.

"When you're under a lot of stress with a sick family member," said Roberts, "it's nice to know what to do and who the nurses and doctors are by name." According to Roberts, this is an important aspect as to why she volunteers at the hospital.

The younger people that volunteer at NVRH have different points of view as to why they volunteer their time at the hospital.

"For the younger ones," said Fhatney, "it gives them a lot of experience to see what kind of job they'll want to do later on in life."

Darrell shows the younger volunteers at the hospital a licensed nurse's aid perspective of doing things.

"I show them how to make beds, how to use lifts to get people out of bed that can't move on their own," said Darrell, "they're really exposed to the full realm of what a licensed nurse's aid does."

Davis, who wants to go to school to become a nurse, said she volunteers at NVRH to make it look good on college transcripts. "I plan on being a volunteer at NVRH until I get out of high school."

Being a volunteer at NVRH also has some benefits that come along with it. "Parties are thrown for us," and that is one of the benefits you receive as being a volunteer, said Georgett Auger of Lyndonville, who is now retired and volunteers at the information desk

According to December's Volunteer Auxiliary Newsletter at NVRH, another benefit that people receive for volunteering at the hospital are pins awarded for the amount of hours served at NVRH.

In the newsletter, it stated that there was a party in which pins were given out for the amount of hours people have volunteered at the hospital. One person received a pin for donating 6,625 hours, and another person received one for donating 7,000 hours of service.

Darrell said that for some of the older volunteers who are now retired, some of them retired nurses, "it gives them a sense that they're still in the picture," that they are still able to do the functions that they did for years.

Bev Moffett of St. Johnsbury, who was a nurse for 50 years and became a volunteer in 1991 after she retired, now works around the mammography room where patients are checked for breast cancer.

Moffett said that she volunteers at the hospital because "I love the people that [I] work with." Moffett also said that she gets to see a lot of the same patients that she saw when she was a nurse.

One thing Wollrath said she tells her volunteers is that she does not pay them, not because they're worthless, but "because they're priceless."

"A lot of the younger people," said Wollrath, "are encouraged to do community service, and they're not doing it to get paid; they're doing it to give something of themselves."

According to NVRH's volunteer brochure, there is a wide variety of jobs people can volunteer for at the hospital, from working in medical records to helping out at the nursing office. The brochure also states that some of the benefits that come along with volunteering include "free flu shots and TB testing annually."

The brochure shows that you don't have to have a particular background in order to be a volunteer at NVRH. Some of the examples the brochure gives of the kinds of people who volunteer at the hospital include farmers, college students, teachers, etc.

People don't have to have any qualifications to be a volunteer; "we try to gear the criteria of work towards what they're capable of doing," Darrell said.

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