Amanda Henderson's work is all about compassion and building trust.
Henderson works as a Clinical Unit Coordinator at GBMC. She strives to build trust between patients and nurses and to treat patients as family.
"I do take each of these patients' private journeys very personally, so I wake up at night thinking about patients on the unit, hoping they're doing well. Sometimes I call in, in the middle of the night, to see how patients are doing," she said.
Henderson said everyone at GBMC works to treat people as individuals, not just another number.
But it wasn't always her plan to go into nursing. She decided to change careers from a biomedical engineer to a nurse after a life-changing experience with a patient.
Henderson was trying to stay in the background, working with a monitor as biomedical engineers are supposed to do, when a man got terrible news about his prognosis and that he probably wouldn't survive the next day or two.
The man had no family with him and turned to Henderson and her mentor to ask for someone to hold his hand.
"I ended up staying with that man the rest of the day and he did expire," Henderson said. "It just made me feel like part of his family, somebody who just was there to care for him and give him a little extra support when he needed it."
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