I have had the pleasure of working with Kimberly since my first day of orientation here in the Holtzman Twins NICU. She is always willing to come in to assist with critically ill infants, and in the past has dropped what she is doing and rushed in to help her team care for babies in their greatest time of need. She helps families process and cope during their time of complete distress and bewilderment.
On one occasion, working with a family that had a baby with severe deformities, she was able to work with the parents enough with the help of physical therapy, other nurses, and interpreters to teach not only the parents but the baby to be able to eat by mouth and be able to be discharged. This discharge was complicated by outpatient follow-up appointments at OHSU, as well as many other follow-up appointments; coupled with the ability of the parents to care for and feed the patient. She worked tirelessly with not only the MARTI but was able to have the PCP come and see the patient in the NICU and translate as well as go over discharge instructions and follow up plans. The next day, discharge day was a big day for the baby and the family, because of her hard work the previous day, all the boxes were checked, and the parents had confidence that they would be able to take their baby home and be successful with feeding and caring for him. On that morning of discharge, some questions came up because the nurse assigned to the patient had not taken care of him recently. When we called Kimberly to ask a few questions about the discharge teaching, she stated "I'm around the corner, I'll be right there". She knew how complicated and challenging the discharge was and wanted to make sure the baby was able to go home as planned. She came in and finalized the discharge and wrapped everything up, so they could go home and still made it out on time to go to church and read some scriptures.
For this family, she made a huge impact on their confidence taking home a baby with such severe deformities of his face and helped them to be able to look past those deformities, which if you met these parents you would know that they had the utmost love for their baby, understandably initially they were concerned about feeding the baby and how he would be able to breath ok, but on discharge day they were beaming. The smiles on their faces when leaving with their baby were priceless and I honestly am not sure if it would have happened without Kimberly and her compassionate care. As I said before she truly is an asset for this team and for our tiniest and most critical population.