This month we want you to get to know Erin Adkins, director of clinical services. She is one of the co-founders of Alamo Hospice and the soul of our clinical team. Her commitment sets the standard that defines our reputation for clinical excellence.

Erin, welcome to NSIDE MD. Let’s start by telling our readers a little about you and how you got into nursing.
I grew up in San Angelo, out in west Texas. I am the baby of eight children and have two older sisters who are nurses. So, I just naturally gravitated toward nursing. I attended the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio. I did some med-surge and oncology early on, a little case management, but eventually gravitated toward quality and utilization review for most of my career. I also did some legal nurse consulting for a few years which was very eye opening for me and ended up expanding my commitment to quality issues in health care. When the opportunity to become a part of starting and owning Alamo Hospice came along, it just felt like the right fit for me and a chance to do something really important.

What is it about hospice that interests you as a nurse?
The thing that grabs me, and has totally hooked me is the holistic approach that hospice allows me to be a part of. We see the whole picture every day, the physical, the spiritual, the emotional, and the psychological and we get to utilize everything we learned as nurses to assess and care for the whole person. We also get to interact every day with a true team, made up of real professionals in medicine, physicians, nursing, social work, spiritual counseling, dietary, and others. I love being a part of that team.

How does your background in quality affect your role as our clinical leader?
Well, I think I have a reputation within our team of being a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to the care our patients receive. I want each patient’s experience to be the absolute best that we can offer. I am totally committed to delivering that care in a way that allows us to measure how well we are doing. It is one thing to say you give great care, but can you prove that you do? It is critical to me to know that when we go out there every day and say we will give a patient great care that I have a way of backing that claim up. Through our internal quality initiatives, we are able to measure our performance and figure out what we need to improve and define areas where we can improve.

Tell our readers a little about the nurses you work with at Alamo Hospice.
We are amazingly fortunate to have an incredible team of nurses who love hospice. If you add it up, I would guess we have over 100 years of combined hospice experience on our nursing team. And, because their individual backgrounds and experiences are so varied, we have strengths in just about every area. The beauty of that is we work as a true team, and so we are able to pull from each person. I feel so very lucky to work for these amazing women who know how to handle pretty much any situation that you throw at them. And, they have unbelievable passion, to the point that we have to try to guard them from self-inflicted exhaustion because they give so much to their patients.

One of the unique aspects of hospice is that we care for patients in a lot of different settings, homes, nursing homes, assisted living facilities and small group homes. Does the setting impact your philosophy of care?
It really doesn’t matter where they live, whether it is under a bridge or in the nicest home in the city. The care is and should be the same across the board and tailored to that setting. So when we sit down to develop care plans and talk about the individual patient, we truly try to figure out their needs, given the surrounding that they are in and who is taking care of them.

How do you feel about providing hospice care in our community?
We have an amazingly diverse culture here. To learn and respect all of the cultural differences in end of life care is a very rewarding and for me nurturing experience. We are privileged to spend this time with some wonderful and beautiful families, who represent every cultural, racial and socio-economic part of our city. W get to experience all of this diversity in a very unique setting of time in an individual’s life.

Please come back next month as we continue our journey of uncovering hospice.