Heather Hibbard, BSN, RN, manager of the medical oncology and infusion center at the University of Louisville , is being honored for making a difference in the lives of cancer patients. Hibbard is one of seven health care providers who will be in the spotlight at the Third Annual Commitment to Compassion Luncheon, sponsored by Passport Health Plan, Insider Louisville and the Compassionate Louisville Healthcare Constellation. The event is scheduled for Wednesday, Feb. 28, at the Muhammad Ali Center.

Hibbard uses her training as well as her personal experience to make life a little easier for cancer patients. Her father and grandfather were diagnosed with lung cancer within one month of each other, and passed away one month apart in 2013. Although it was a painful time for her, that experience helps her understand how to improve care provided to the patients at the Brown Cancer Center.

Hibbard says she wants to provide the kind of care for patients and families that she would want to receive. To help make things easier, she developed a lab and line room where patients can have their vitals and lab work done before seeing the physician. This reduced patient wait times by two thirds.

“Cancer does not have to be a death sentence, but the patients need top-notch, nurturing and individualized care,” Hibbard said. “My one goal in life is to make a difference in cancer care – to give others hope that we are doing everything we can as an oncology center. I have a great group of people who want better care for their patients and I help them in reaching that goal.”

It is often little things that make a difference for patients.

“You don’t ever hear, ‘thank you for accessing my port,’” Hibbard said. “But you do hear ‘thank you for being gentle with me,’ ‘thank you for listening,’ ‘thank you for calling home health and getting things set up so my life is a little easier.’”

The Commitment to Compassion luncheon, emceed by television health and science reporter Jean West, will include recognition of the compassionate care honorees, a performance by the West Louisville Boys Choir and a panel discussion on “Innovative and compassionate care in West Louisville.” Reservations are available .

“I witnessed what cancer did to our families. I went home with them to help them with the aftermath of their treatment. I held their hands at the end, and I let them go,” Hibbard said.

Her father and grandfather passed away one month apart in 2013. Although it was a painful time for her, Hibbard began to draw on her personal experience to improve care provided at the UofL Brown Cancer Center.

“I did not know if I was going to be able to walk back in this office at all. But believe it or not, it actually made me stronger,” Hibbard said. “I started saying, ‘What can I do to be a better nurse?’”

As a nurse manager, Hibbard is in a position to make things easier for many of the patients at the Brown Cancer Center. For example, to improve appointment turnaround times, she created a lab and line room where patients can have their vitals and lab work done before seeing the physician. This reduced patient wait times from 60 minutes to 20 minutes.

“She has streamlined a lot of our processes,” said Beth Small, RN, a nurse clinician at Brown Cancer Center. “She lets us do our job as opposed to micromanaging us. Every doctor, every nurse and every patient is different. She gives us the autonomy to address issues and take care of our patients and our physicians the way we need to.”

She also takes the extra steps to help when patients are having more than their share of difficulty.

“She knows that not everyone has fairy tale life. When we have patients in need, she has organized and pulled us together to make sure they have Christmas or whatever they need. Someone might need shoes, someone might need clothes. We have patients who have that much need,” said Small, who was a charge nurse at the cancer center and interviewed Hibbard when she was hired.

Hibbard believes she can help improve care for patients by improving life for the nurses and staff.

“Take care of them, and they take care of the patients,” Hibbard said.

Path to nursing

To help the nurses increase their knowledge, Hibbard began inviting monthly educational speakers. She is familiar with intentional development, having begun her career as a certified nurse’s aide. The nurses she worked with told her she would make a great nurse, but she was apprehensive about nursing education.

After her children were born, however, she made the decision to push herself. She joined the Brown Cancer Center as a medical assistant and started college while all three of her children were still in diapers. First, she obtained an LPN degree, then an RN, and in 2016, she received her BSN.

Now Hibbard mentors other nurses to help them achieve their goals.

“Heather exhibits the role of the servant leader. She grew up as a professional in the Cancer Center, and she now leads by example and works with people where they are as individuals – not just as employees. We have several staff members who have grown under Heather’s leadership and several who are in school,” said Kimberlee Hanna, MBA, BSN, RN, OCN, interim director for medical oncology and infusion at the Brown Cancer Center and Hibbard’s supervisor.

Hanna said Hibbard is constantly working on ways to improve processes within the cancer center, which recently transitioned from management by KentuckyOne Health to University Medical Center.

“She takes problems and looks for different ways to approach them.  This leader always keeps the patient at center of focus,” Hanna said. “As a leader, she is very positive and very focused on the direction the cancer center is going. I’m always encouraged by her level of drive, courage and creativity.”

Hibbard says she wants to provide the kind of care for patients and families that she would want to receive.

“Every patient is so important. I see a glimpse of my father in each one of them. The daughter who is with them, or sister or mother, I see them as me,” Hibbard said. “I’ve been out to make things different so they don’t have to go through the things I went through with my father and my grandfather.”

It isn’t always big things that make a difference, however.

“You don’t ever hear, ‘thank you for accessing my port,’” Hibbard said. “But you do hear ‘thank you for being gentle with me,’ ‘thank you for listening,’ ‘thank you for calling home health and getting things set up so my life is a little easier.’”

In recognition of her exemplary care for patients, Hibbard received the Daisy Award for Exceptional Nurses in April.

“I’ve been a nurse for 36 years and probably the biggest compliment I can give her is I’d let her take care of me any day,” Small said. “She is a wonderful nurse.”

Until recently, Friends Eye Center in Tamale, Ghana, lacked basic ophthalmic equipment and the center’s surgical microscope was outdated and cumbersome. The center, directed by Seth Wanye, MD, provides vision care for nearly 3 million residents of the West African nation and serves as a training site for future ophthalmologists.

Henry J. Kaplan, MD, chair of the UofL Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences, visited Friends Eye Center during a medical mission trip several years ago.

“Most of the equipment they had was non-functional. The equipment we gave them we no longer use because of the acquisition of more technologically-advanced diagnostic devices,” Kaplan said. “Many of the people there have totally lost their eyesight and are dependent on their relatives and other support structures, which presents an enormous economic burden.”

Wanye, who regularly visits UofL to enhance his surgical skills, was visiting Louisville in 2015 when Kaplan offered to donate the equipment to his center in Ghana.

“It was like a dream come true,” Wanye said. “It helps me perform thorough examinations of the eye so I can identify other problems, not just the cataract that you can see. It also gives the patients comfort and they are fascinated.”

Shipping large items to Africa is not a simple process, however, and it was nearly a year before the equipment reached the center. Thanks to multiple organizations that shared the expense and worked to transport the instruments, the Friends Eye Center now has a slit lamp, which allows Wanye to examine his patients’ eyes more precisely, a better surgical microscope, chairs for both the surgeon and the patient, and an auto refractor for determining eyeglass prescriptions.

Wanye, who was the only ophthalmologist serving the Northern and Upper West regions of Ghana until a colleague joined him last year, also works with future physicians in the center to introduce them to the specialty of ophthalmology. Most Ghanaian medical students choose other specialties since ophthalmology is not a medical priority in Ghana.

“You have so many other diseases that are killing people. They say eye diseases don’t kill so they are overlooked,” Wanye said. But he has seen that restoring vision allows individuals to regain their independence and enables children to go back to school.

“When you go out into the villages, people are poor, they don’t have money but they are blind. So we will get the resources and do the surgery.”

Wanye receives funding from non-governmental organizations, such as and the , to provide eye screenings and perform between 2,000 and 4,000 cataract surgeries each year. In addition to screenings and surgeries on location, Wanye provides care for patients in the Friends Eye Center.

“To be one doctor that serves millions of people is not a trivial task. He does it because of a love and conviction for the good that he is doing. I really do admire what he’s doing and that’s why we are more than happy to assist him,” Kaplan said. This is the first time UofL’s ophthalmology department has donated equipment to a foreign health-care organization.

Wanye hopes to establish a regular exchange between UofL ophthalmologists and the center, similar to a program in which residents and faculty members from the UofL Department of Pediatrics travel to the Tamale Teaching Hospital several times each year. Tamale is an official sister city to Louisville.

“My dream is to have some continuous program, especially with the residents’ program here, so we would have residents coming to Friends Eye Center,” Wanye said. In the meantime, he is grateful to UofL for the donated equipment. “We know how valuable they are and how expensive they are. They will help us deliver more quality service to our people. Thank you to everyone at UofL,” Wanye said.

Equipment photos courtesy Friends Eye Center, Tamale, Ghana

“Compassion is the chief reason we all go into medicine,” Kerzin said. “Research suggests at the third year of medical school, compassion in medical students decreases significantly. I’ll address how to sustain our compassion through our training and out in the world practicing medicine.”

The ceremony will welcome the class of 2020 to the UofL School of Medicine. The students each will receive a white coat, a gift of the Greater Louisville Medical Society, and a stethoscope, provided by an alumnus of the school through . The white coat symbolizes cleanliness, as well as the sense of compassion that inspires students to become physicians. At the ceremony, the students will recite the , promising to serve humanity and honor the traditions of the medical profession.

Kerzin, a California native, is a board-certified family medicine physician and an honorary professor at the University of Hong Kong School of Medicine. He is a former assistant professor of medicine at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle. After traveling to India in the 1980s to help train Tibetan doctors in modern research methods, he studied Buddhism and meditation and ultimately was ordained as a Buddhist monk. Kerzin now provides medical care to the poor in India and serves as a personal physician to the Dalai Lama in addition to traveling around the world to teach about meditation and compassion. He founded the  with the goal to bring more compassion into health care.

UofL School of Medicine White Coat Ceremony
Sunday, July 24, 3-5 p.m.
Louisville Downtown Marriott
280 W. Jefferson St., Louisville, Ky., 40202

Hodge earned the medal for completing a 13.1-mile test of courage and endurance. Carra, a patient with the UofL Division of Pediatric Hematology, Oncology and Stem Cell Transplantation, is running a race of another kind. She was diagnosed with anaplastic astrocytoma, a rare type of brain tumor, in 2009 and has been battling the disease ever since. Hodge presented the medal in recognition of Carra’s courage and determination in battling her disease.

“While we may be giving these patients our race medals, their mettle gives us so much more in return,” Hodge said. “I know my future medical practice will be better because of the courage and resilience I have witnessed in Carra and her family.”

Hodge and 86 other University of Louisville medical students ran the Derby Festival races on April 30 and presented their medals to pediatric patients battling cancer or a blood disease in a ceremony at the Kosair Charities Clinical and Translational Research Building on UofL’s health sciences campus. It was the eighth year UofL students participated in (M4M), an international organization in which endurance athletes donate their awards to critically ill individuals in honor of their courage in the face of life-threatening illnesses.

The UofL chapter of M4M is unique in that the students spend time with the patients before the race, and often run for the same patient year after year. The relationships with their buddies give the students a more intimate understanding of how cancer and life-threatening diseases affect the children and their families, adding a personal dimension to their training to become physicians.

“Medals4Mettle bridges the art and science of medicine. We teach the students about B- and T-cell leukemia, but through this program, they learn the diseases also have names like Mark, Mary and Juliette, that they laugh and they cry and live in families that are affected by the challenges faced in fighting these illnesses,” said Salvatore J. Bertolone Jr., MD, retired professor and previous chief of pediatric oncology and hematology at UofL, who has supported UofL M4M since its inception.

“In a lot of our training, especially in the third year, we are learning what kind of questions to ask. What is the history I need from this patient right now to make the decision that I need to make and get on to the next one,” said Samantha Heidrich, a third-year student and M4M participant. “Through my experience with my buddy Damarys and her family, I have learned there are so many other questions I could and should be asking that will help me make those decisions. What is mom’s work schedule? Can they get care for her little brother when they are coming to the clinic? It’s made me think about the whole patient and the whole family and how we care for them as a unit.”

Heidrich, who has been a distance runner since she was a child, says training for the race also improves her personal wellbeing.

“I have built some really good relationships with my classmates through training. It was a way to build camaraderie, it was a way to release yourself from the study environment for a while, which is a wellness aspect that is sometimes overlooked in our medical education,” Heidrich said.

Fourth-year student McKenzie Vater, who has been involved in the program throughout her medical school training, wrote a scholarly article about UofL M4M that was published in the January issue of the . She surveyed previous participants about the program’s value in medical education and patient relationships. Her research showed that the students and the patients and their families benefited from the interaction.

 “Getting to know and understand the patient as a whole person allows for increased confidence in a physician,” Vater wrote in the article. “This relationship can provide the foundation for patients’ trust, allowing for improvement in patient satisfaction and health care outcomes overall.”

After graduating from UofL School of Medicine this month, Vater will begin her residency training in pediatrics at Vanderbilt University, where she hopes to help establish an M4M chapter similar to the one at UofL.