Taking Time for Patients

Laurie Anderson is one good listener.

She has been a volunteer “patient representative” at Torrance Memorial Hospital for 20 years, putting in more then 6,000 hours of service, the equivalent of three years at a full-time job.

She visits people in their rooms to see if there are any nonmedical questions she can answer.

“Sometimes they’ll want to know about insurance, or about the price of a phone call,” says Anderson, 53, who also trains and directs the hospital’s ever-changing roster of 10 to 15 patient-representative volunteers. “But most of the time they just want to talk to someone. They’re lonely. “

Her love for the volunteer program is rooted in two personal hospital experiences.

The first was seeing her mother-in-law dying in a hospital near San Diego.

“We couldn’t get there that much and I realized she needed people to talk to,” Anderson said. “She would put on this brave face and the family would say how good she looked and here the woman was clearly dying. With a stranger she could be more relaxed.”

Then, shortly before she started volunteering at Torrance Memorial, Anderson was in a hospital for a gallbladder operation.

One day, when she was down in the dumps, a nurse happened by, sat on her bed and talked to her for an hour.

“It was just so nice,” Anderson said.

“Laurie is wonderful, very much a people person,” said Anne Leity, who directs the more than 800 volunteers who work throughout Torrance Memorial and has known Anderson for six years. “She is motivated and professional.”

Hospital administrators say that volunteers are an integral part of their facilities’ operations.

“We wouldn’t be as good or complete” without them, said Carlene Reuscher, senior vice president of patient services at Torrance Memorial.

Last year, Reuscher said, volunteers at Torrance Memorial put in nearly 140,000 hours.

Anderson graduated from Washington High School in Los Angeles and UC Santa Barbara with a degree in home economics. A former elementary school teacher, she lives in Palos Verdes Estates with her husband, a dentist.

She can’t remember her first volunteer job, but by the time her two sons were in school, she was going at it full time. “I was the consummate volunteer. Fund-raising, League of Women Voters, American Youth Soccer, Peninsula Symphony Assn.,” she said.

Anderson, who keeps in shape by running, cycling and swimming, said she requested to work with adults at Torrance Memorial.

“I was so involved with children of my own, I didn’t want anything to do with kids,” she said.

She started at the hospital in 1976, shortly after the patient representative program began. Soon, she was put in charge of patient representatives.

Although she says about 95% of the patients praise the hospital, she does deal with an occasional complaint.

Recently a woman was very upset about how long it took before nurses knew exactly what was ailing her.

“Don’t they talk to the doctor?” the patient asked Anderson. Anderson wrote a summary and promised to bring the incident up at the next meeting between volunteers and the hospital nursing staff.

Mostly, though, besides listening, patient representatives help with such tasks as mailing letters, finding lost articles and explaining hospital costs.

A volunteer job at a hospital is fraught with the potential for sadness, and Anderson has been shaken several times.

One of her saddest moments involved a young woman whose unborn baby was killed in an auto accident that also injured the woman.

“I just sat and talked to her and listened to her for over an hour and calmed her down,” Anderson said.

She also gets sad-eyed when she talks about a 17-year-old girl who was dying of cancer.

“She had such a spirit,” said Anderson, who often visited the girl. “She would put on a wig, and go to a school dance and have a blast. Then she’d come back to the hospital to slowly die.”

“People ask me how can I visit sick people all the time, doesn’t it bother me. I tell them I just want to let people know that other people, people they don’t even know, care about them. That’s enough for me.”

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The Beat

Today’s focus is on a woman who dedicates herself to a volunteer program at a Torrance hospital. Such programs are crucial to the smooth operation of most hospitals, and virtually all local centers welcome volunteers.