HONORED AND PRIVILEGED TO BE A NIGHTINGALE

“I’m honored and humbled to do what I do, It is a privilege to take care of patients and their families in difficult times of their lives.”

Nursing is an incredibly hard job in general, but it takes a special person to excel at pediatric palliative care. Taking children through their chronic and often long journeys through illness requires a patience, love and empathetic touch that Taryn Hamre radiates just by being herself. Her efforts with children and their families throughout their lives make her the perfect recipient of a Nightingale Award.

“I’m honored and humbled to do what I do,” she said. “It is a privilege to take care of patients and their families in difficulttimes of their lives.”

Hamre has a doctorate as a nurse practitioner from Yale, and she has been working at Connecticut Children’s Hospital since 2003. In hematology and oncology, she says, patient and family comfort is the most important aspect of care.

“One of the tools of palliative care is communication skills. You meet children where they are at, and you help them process things where they are,” she said. “Explain things on their level, ask open ended questions, follow their lead.”

The parents need comfort as well. They are seeing the most precious people in their lives terminally or chronically ill.

“People who don’t have experience with it think palliative care means hospice care means their kid is dying and no one is telling them,” Hamre said. “Parents can be anxious to meet us, they can be distraught, and there can be a distrust, so when I do a new consult, I call out the elephant in the room. I will ask,

‘what do you know about palliative care?’” she said. “That opens the room up. You get a spectrum of responses, and what I say then is that our team is the extra layer of support.”

Hamre and her team then get to know the family, their child, and they work to coordinate care and symptom management, and pain plans. They help keep all the child’s providers in the loop.

Hamre loves her job because of the long-term relationships she cultivates with her patients.

“We follow these patients along their journey for as long as they need. It’s a continuity, and they don’t have to meet a new team every time there is a flareup.”

In fact, for photos for the award ceremony, Hamre was able to phone some of her patients that she has cared for over many years, which really made the event even more special.

“I was able to bring in patients that I have taken care of since they were little, and it was so great to be able to call them and ask them to pose with me because I won the award, and I got to share this moment with them.”

There is a special strength in child palliative care that comes from the patients themselves, she says.

“Kids are amazing. They are so resilient. In the face of things like cancer, or trauma or surgeries, they have this ability to bounce back, to smile, to be in the playroom doing an art project even though they are super tired,” Hamre said. “I’m always inspired by their resilience and their strength.”

In addition to patient care, Hamre takes part in several advisory boards, steering committees, and has been elected to the advisory board for the Department of Public Health Palliative Care Council, which allows her to be a voice for them.

“We really have a lapse in terms of homecare, limited by agencies and nurses and their comfort in homecare visits [during the pandemic], so I’m working for change there,” she said.

The COVID pandemic has rocked the base of care for long-term patients, she says.

“I found it devasting to see what it was doing to patients at end of life in the hospital,” she said. “Everything was restricted. Only one family member was allowed bedside at a time. And it affected death and the grieving process. These poor families couldn’t have traditional funerals, they had to face their grief in a global pandemic. It’s really heartbreaking what the impacts of covid were.”

Hamre found this path during college. She was making copies as a TA at UMass and saw an ad for Paul Newman’s Hole in the Wall Gang.

“It was a life changing experience. Paul Newman’s camp is a piece of heaven on Earth for kids who face a lot of hard diagnoses,” she said. “It was one of the gifts of my life to be able to be an employee there for two years, and it led me here.”

As she receives this award, she says it left her speechless. She says she just loves what she does.

“My job reminds me every day of how beautiful and fragile life can be. It’s humbled me in many ways, and it reminds me how important it is to make time for the people you love in your life. You don’t know what battles people are fighting.Always be kind. I findwhat I do really rewarding.”