A ONCE IN A LIFETIME RECOGNITION
“They work hard, we all work hard. And it’s starting to show.”
- Nightingale honoree,
Linda Legall-Tyndale
The Nightingale Award is a prestigious honor that a nurse can only receive once in their lifetime. Since its inception in 2001, scores of Connecticut nurses have received the award, usually after several years of devout service. This is what makes Linda Legall-Tyndale so special. Legall-Tyndale stepped into the role of Director of Nursing at Eastern Connecticut Health Network’s Woodlake at Tolland just months ago, in January of this year. She starts work at 5:30 in the morning most days, and while her director responsibilities include high-level administrative work and education in the long-term, she spends a lot of her time with patients and their families.
“I go in and ask them how was their day, did they have their showers, did they have any visitors? I will feed patients. The staff has to see you in there. It helps them,” she said. “They say no one ever did that. They just stayed in the office. But there are times when you just have to go out on the floor and help.”
In addition to her patient work, Legall-Tyndale is trying to bring the building up to a five-star rating by implementing quality assurance checklists and retraining staff to streamline and centralize care while still providing individualized attention to every patient.
“Since I’ve been here, I’ve put a lot of things in motion. There are different quality assurance programs in place to make sure we are competitive, and we are doing what we need to do to take care of our residents,” she said. “We pledge not to do any harm, but if you are not checking the chart, and someone is missing a medication, you are doing a harm, whether you know it or not.”
While she’s only been at Woodlake since January, Legall-Tyndale has been in the medical field for almost 30 years. When she first came to North America from Trinidad, she started as a housekeeper, to provide for her family. She excelled there, and her bosses encouraged her to become a CNA.
“They said I had the right presence and mood for it, so I did it, and after I worked at that for a while, my bosses said I should become an LPN, and then an RN, so I did those too.”
Legall-Tyndale started this journey in Canada, and moved to the United States as a travel nurse in 1992. Once she moved to Connecticut, she set down roots, and currently lives in East Hartford with her husband. She says the COVID-19 pandemic has hit nursing homes particularly hard.
“It was very difficult to keep residents’ spirits up,” she said. “I had our recreational staff go around to with iPads, and video phone calls, so they could speak to someone they loved at least once or twice a week.”
Older residents were shut off from regular familial contact with the coronavirus restrictions, which left them lonely and missing their loved ones.
“We had window visits, where we would bring the residents downstairs, and they could see their family outside through the window,” Legall-Tyndale said. “It’s been rough.”
Throughout the pandemic and beyond, LegallTyndale puts patient care and happiness above all else, and she does it by solving problems one by one, no matter how big or small.
“Sometimes people think if you don’t address the problem, it will go away, but it never goes away,” she said. “It may sound small, but small things turn big over time. But if you address it, you’re set. The patients are happy, the staff is happy, and you are happy; it’s a win all around.”
She says winning the Nightingale Award is a huge honor, and true to form, says that the nurses on her staff are more deserving of it.
“They work hard, we all work hard. And it’s starting to show.”