Despite last-ditch efforts, NurseAdvice line goes silent
NurseAdvice New Mexico Director Connie Fiorenzio bids farewell to nurse Phyllis Martinez on New Year’s Eve, the nonprofit’s last day of service. The public-private partnership, which provided nurses by telephone to New Mexico residents for more than 10 years, shut down because of funding troubles.
The last call fielded by NurseAdvice New Mexico came just after 11 p.m. on New Year’s Eve. The young man on the line was a familiar patient with a high-risk medical history who was vomiting blood. Patty Walker, the nurse who answered his call, determined he needed emergency assistance and connected him with 911 dispatchers.
Walker also had answered one of the first calls at the nonprofit service more than a decade ago. She had worked the evening shift on the day the statewide medical phone line launched in 2006. “I’d like to take the last call tonight. I think that would be memorable,” she had said earlier Dec. 31, surrounded by about a dozen fellow nurses who faced an uncertain future.
When the clock struck midnight, ringing in a new year, the phones went silent. Revenues had steeply declined over the past year, and eleventh-hour efforts to shore up the budget had come too late.
For 10 1/2 years, NurseAdvice provided residents across the state with free, 24-hour telephone access to New Mexico-based nurses. The goal was to ease the strain on rural health clinics and hospitals overwhelmed with unnecessary emergency room visits, and ultimately save the state millions of dollars in health care costs. The public-private partnership began with legislative startup funds, and was hailed in recent years as a national model. But as managed care companies that had long supported the program began switching to out-of-state phone services, the nonprofit’s revenues began to decline.
Director Connie Fiorenzio announced a couple of months ago that a shutdown was imminent.
During an interview at the nonprofit’s office in Albuquerque, Fiorenzio said medical cannabis producers had approached her in November with hopes of creating a partnership that would save the phone line, at least until lawmakers who support the program could introduce legislation to help fund it.
With a surge in patients enrolled in New Mexico’s Medical Cannabis Program over the last year and thousands more expected to sign up in the next six months, Fiorenzio said, marijuana producers were hoping the nurses could provide patient support and assist with the state’s overwhelmed enrollment and registration-renewal system.
“Unfortunately,” she said, “it was too late by the time the proposal came through.” Other partners of NurseAdvice had already ended their contracts.
Duke Rodriguez, CEO of Ultra Health, one of the cannabis producers hoping to partner with NurseAdvice, called the phone line’s shutdown a “tremendous loss.”
“We’ve long felt that the NurseAdvice line was an unbelievable resource in New Mexico,” he said Friday. Rodriguez envisioned a cannabis producer-funded expansion of the nonprofit’s mission to include serving as a triage system for medical marijuana patients, not just in New Mexico but around the region. But the plan came too late.
“The need for such a program still exists,” Rodriguez said.
More than 30 NurseAdvice workers remained on the job until the last day, when they gathered at the office to exchange gifts, share memories and take the last calls that would trickle in. Some of the nurses said they had found similar work with out-of-state companies that will allow them to work remotely. Some planned to retire. Others were still hoping they wouldn’t have to make a plan.
“I was waiting until the end,” said Karolyn Lane, who had worked at NurseAdvice for almost three years. “Waiting and hoping. … It’s going to be hard to replace this job.”
Patients, too, had expressed disappointment in the shutdown, she said. “People are just so thankful that you’ve been able to give them information because they couldn’t get into the ER, or they, of course, don’t want to go into the ER. It’s just such a valuable service.”
Brian Lewis, a 57-year-old Taos resident, agrees. He said he woke up late one night last year, just a few months after undergoing nasal surgery, with a heavy nosebleed that wouldn’t stop. He called NurseAdvice.
“It was frightening,” Lewis said in a phone interview this week. But the nurse who took his call put his mind at ease. She also advised him on how to treat the problem at home until he was able to see his regular physician. “That was such an incredible service,” he said.
NurseAdvice reported that it served more than 1.4 million New Mexico patients in its decadelong run and logged over 1.7 million calls.
Daniella Gonzales, who had worked there for about nine months, recalled one recent patient, a teen mom-to-be, who had a cold and wasn’t sure if it was safe to take medication. The teenager didn’t want to harm her baby. The girl was scared, Gonzales said, “but I think she felt more comfortable when she knew I was here in New Mexico. … I felt like I really helped her that night.”
Some of the nurses’ most memorable calls “probably are ones that shouldn’t be put in print,” Walker joked.
Over the years, callers have posed plenty of questions the nurses couldn’t answer, such as how to heal a pet. One woman wanted to know how she could find her husband, who had gone to the kitchen and then seemed to disappear from their home. Another asked NurseAdvice for help detecting a gas leak in her residence. The nurses often got calls from people wanting to know how to cook a Thanksgiving turkey.
Said Walker, “They think nurses have the answer for everything.”
The Santa Fe New Mexican is a sister-paper of The Taos News. Contact Cynthia Miller at 505-986-3095 or cmiller@sfnewmexican.com.
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