After Mitral Valve Prolapse Death, Which Scholarship Was Created For Your Daughter?

Kim:

Banner Heart Hospital offers a scholarship every year to a Banner employee who is a nursing student. So, they have to have been accepted into nursing school. They have to be actually going, but they have to have the acceptance and they have to have the seat because part of the problem with the nursing profession right now is there just aren’t enough seats in school to create nurses.

We don’t have enough people that can teach nursing skills to let the number of people who want to be nurses go to nursing school, and nursing school is expensive. It’s one of the more expensive than majors. It’s expensive to educate nurses so it’s an expensive program.

So after we sat down with the CEO, Kathy Bollinger was the CEO at Banner Heart at the time and we talked to her, John talked to her about the fact that we wanted to do something in Jennifer’s memory and what could we do in Jennifer’s memory and Kathy was the one who came up with the idea of what about educating nurses because we need nurses.

So we offer a scholarship every year, some years we can give two where, it’s not a full scholarship but it’s a significant amount of money to help these people that want to build their nursing careers to get into school and finish school and we have given scholarships to all different kind; men and women, young and very, very established in their life already.

So we are crossing the spectrum, but we always are looking for people who really get the idea of what it means to be a nurse; what it means to really have the compassion in the patience to care for patients and we have no problem finding someone every year or two people every year win the scholarship.

So that’s one of the ways that we remember Jennifer. There is also a scholarship at the college where her aunt teaches in Georgia and also a nursing scholarship to help people at that school pay for their nursing educations and then we have a fund down at the University of Arizona Sarver Heart Center in Jennifer’s name too.

But the nursing scholarships are important because it was really funny because people will say, you know, “Would Jennifer been a nurse?” No way. Jennifer was totally freaked out by blood – wasn’t going to happen. But she had all the other requirements to be a nurse. She understood compassion and passion and she understood things like needing to act because someone needed help, not standing back and waiting but getting in there and getting her hands dirty and doing things when someone needed help.

She had a lot of the competencies of nursing even though she never would have been a nurse. So it’s the logical place for us to remember her is by helping other people become nurses.

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• Mitral Valve Prolapse

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