Education Matters: The Tidewell Foundation Commitment

By Ryan G. Van Cleave

For 40 years, Tidewell has been providing service to our region, making it one of the oldest hospices in the entire country. “It’s also one of the highest rated in terms of quality,” adds Debbie Mason, who serves as President of the new Tidewell Foundation, which came into being on July 1 of this year. “We’ve always been a not-for-profit organization and have had active fundraising, but it’s only this year that we formalized that into a foundation to provide perpetual support for all that Tidewell does.”

TRAINING INITIATIVES

One of the most recent—and successful—initiatives Tidewell has undertaken is forming a nurse residency program. Pauline Mailey, Tidewell’s Chief Nursing Officer, says that while nursing residency programs in hospitals are quite common, having those in hospice environments is rare.

“There’s a very serious nationwide shortage of nurses,” Mailey explains in her delightful Scottish accent. And Tidewell was having a hard time competing with hospitals because it required a nurse to have one year of acute care experience before considering them for hospice work. “We were losing an opportunity to be in the market for the best of the best,” she says, because hospitals didn’t require previous experience for interns—they simply went out to nursing schools and colleges, and offered opportunities that started right away. 

“We can do that, too,” Mailey and others decided. 

Now Tidewell’s nurse residency program helps new interns gain that necessary experience while under the careful 1:1 tutelage of a Tidewell clinical coach. “We had a soft launch, with one intern, and one coach,” she says. “But as of this fiscal year, we’ll be ready to graduate twelve interns a year.” Tidewell has enough patients, coaches, and infrastructure to expand that out to 24 nursing interns, if it chooses.

From the very first moment, nursing interns at Tidewell know they’re part of a team. They get to help take care of the physical, psychological, social, and spiritual needs not just of the patient, but the entire family. That’s what Tidewell calls the “unit of care”—the patient and immediate family. 

“When you go to the hospital,” Mailey explains, “you’re hopeful that the outcome is you’re going to improve. With hospice, often the best outcome for patients and families is a positive dying experience, with the symptoms managed, and all other needs met, such as pre-planning, grief support, pain management, and more. Then we provide bereavement care for thirteen months.” Considering that Tidewell works with about 1,200 people a day, that’s a lot of care being provided, and most of it occurring in the patient’s own home versus in the nine area Tidewell facilities. 

At Tidewell, it’s all about the mission. “We’re not-for-profit, which means we’re here to serve,” Mailey says. “We get full support from our board to do what needs to be done so we can provide the very best end-of-life care, regardless of people’s ability to pay.” 

Because of the success of its hospice nurse residency program, Tidewell is launching a similar program for home health aides this year since the demand for those aides is as great as it is for RNs. “We’re launching a program where we’ll be able to give a stipend along with training to people so they can learn to be a hospice home health aide,” says Mason, “which gives them a clear career path. If they choose, they can take additional training to become a certified nurse assistant, and from there, more training is available through our system to get them to become LPNs, and then even RNs.”

COPING WITH GRIEF

Mason notes that Tidewell is the largest provider of free grief services in the region, annually serving more than 8,500 patients and family members. “In addition to providing counseling and therapy, we do a lot of education about stress management, lifestyle adaptation to grief, and helping people move through the stages of grief.” 

Because of tremendous local need, Tidewell launched the Blue Butterfly Family Grief program in 2018. It offers grief support for children and teens ages 5 to 18 and their caregivers when they lose an important person in their lives. Mason says that the program serves about 110 families in locations in Lakewood Ranch and Port Charlotte, and they’re working hard to make Blue Butterfly mobile so they can get into the low-income communities of Sarasota and Manatee counties, where transportation is sometimes a real barrier to getting people the help they need.

It’s hard to talk about grief without considering how COVID-19 has created new challenges for our community. “We realize the community is struggling around loss,” says Mason, because there’s such a loss of connectivity. It’s not always safe to attend a graduation, wedding, or even a funeral or celebration of life. Many of these get cancelled, or have to be very small, limited, or remote. “People are really suffering from a sense of loss, so we’ve developed a free 24-hour bilingual community health telephone service—The Community Hope Line—to provide resources to people when they’re feeling at their wits’ end.”

THE MANY DIMENSIONS OF CARING

The Tidewell Foundation raises money and gives grants back to Tidewell to support its various programs, carrying on the tradition of philanthropic service to the community. The year before the Foundation was even officially formed, Tidewell gave away $4.4 million worth of free services. About $2 million was in direct charitable care for people who couldn’t afford hospice, didn’t have insurance, or weren’t old enough to qualify for Medicare. Another $60,000 went to pediatric care. “People don’t think about children being in hospice,” Mason says, “but it happens, and we care for them and their families.”

Tidewell also gets a lot of patients from referrals for hospice and for community grief services. Local hospitals refer patients who have a miscarriage, or if a family member has a stroke or debilitating car accident. Funeral homes refer families who’ve lost a loved one. Schools refer children and adults after incidents at school. Local businesses refer employees when someone dies in the workplace. Handling all of those grief services spends about $1.5 million of philanthropic money.

Plus, Tidewell does things for-profit hospices don’t often do, like provide art therapy, music therapy, veterans services programs, massage therapy, reiki, and other services that reduce the pain of patients, which helps them have a more pleasant end journey and give them more quality time to connect with families. 

Also, Tidewell has a wish fund which allows them to grant amazing wishes of dying patients, from a veteran who wanted to go up in a plane one last time, to a concert pianist who wanted to attend one final symphony performance, to helping fly down family members who don’t otherwise have the resources to do so. They also have a humanitarian fund to help patients and their families deal with bills at home, or even pay for funerals and cremations for those who need the extra financial support.

It all starts with nurses like Mailey and employees like Mason who find hospice some of the most worthwhile work a person can do. And while Tidewell has 900 caring employees just like them, there also have 1,200 volunteers who really make a difference. And Mason adds that no matter your interest or passion, there’s a way to invest in that through the Tidewell Foundation to make it happen.

Mason sums up the Tidewell commitment, saying, “Donors who have been patients of ours say things like ‘you people are angels—you didn’t just take care of my husband/father/mother/brother—you brought me peace, hope. You gave me such compassion when I needed it.’ That’s a beautiful experience to bring to a family. That’s what we’re here to do.”

FOR MORE INFORMATION on the Tidewell Foundation, please visit  www.tidewellfoundation.org or call 941.552.7546. The Community Hope Line is 877.658.8896, though people can also email Tidewell’s social workers and grief therapists at hope@tidewell.org