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By Melissa Anderson
TIMES STAFF WRITER
Janice Bright never saw herself as anything other than a nurse while growing up, even as young as the age of 4. She wanted to help people and nursing was her calling.
Well, she said she may have had a small dream to be a famous movie star since her father ran the local theater in Bridgeport, Neb., but show business just didn’t work out, she said with a laugh.
“I don’t think (nursing is) just something you decide to do. You say, ‘I will be a nurse’,” she said.
She had some health problems in college and her parents were concerned she wouldn’t be able to follow her dreams of becoming a nurse, but Bright said she didn’t let it get her down. She knew nursing was her future and she wanted to help people.
Now after being a nurse for 54 years, Bright is retiring.
She graduated from college at the University of Nebraska School of Nursing in Lincoln in 1964. She then worked in Texas, Colorado and western Nebraska before coming to Papillion to help open Midlands Hospital more than 33 years ago in January of 1976. Midlands is now part of the Alegent Health System. Bright moved around because her husband of 45 years, Dwayne, was in the military.
“I was part of the original orientation group that came in (to Midlands),” she said. “We wrote policies and procedures. The building wasn’t even finished.”
Bright said that since starting at Midlands more than three decades ago, the hospital has changed physically and technologically, making the nurses technologically savvy as well. Plus, she said almost any state-of-the-art medicine that has been created can be found at Midlands.
“I’ll tell you one thing that has not changed and that’s the caliber of people who work here,” Bright said. “I think they are some of the most compassionate people, the most responsible people, the most dedicated people, caring. And I think our leadership has vision and leads by example.”
Bright said the tone at Midlands was set from the beginning because of the tenacity, dedication and generosity of the first board of trustees. Otherwise, the hospital wouldn’t be here today.
“It’s been really good to watch the growth,” she said. “When we were placed out here I said we were probably five years before our time and the community hadn’t caught up to us yet. But think how much more it would have cost to build (Midlands) five years later and so they said if we can get the basics down here, if we can stay alive until the community catches up to us, it’ll be fine.”
The employees even did their part to help buy the first CAT scanner by having a bake sale, Bright said.
“And we all felt, whatever it takes because we knew we needed to move on — that we had to have some of that technology and we were still not in a good financial situation but if you can’t invest, you’re not going to grow.
Sometimes you have to spend a dime to make a dollar — and it was lots of dimes but we did make lots of dollars.”
Bright started out as a staff nurse, then became a house supervisor for 19 years, while becoming the first Quality Assurance coordinator for 13 of those years, eventually moving into Continuous Quality Improvement where she is currently in the Quality Improvement specialist position.
Her favorite job was the house supervisor because she said, laughing, “I’m basically nosy and I wanted to know what was going on throughout the entire house and I did. I really enjoyed nursing supervision. That was my fun job.”
She said “one of her joys” was working with young nurses or inexperienced nurses and watching and helping them grow.
“I’d suddenly watch them not needing to call me to ask me anymore. They knew,” she said. “It always just tickled me when I could see that. So as a nurse you also can affect your co-workers and your peers.”
While working in her quality positions, Bright said it was fun to see the affect she had on the patients, her peers and the doctors, while showing the results of all the good work she had put in.
Bright said that Midlands’, and Alegent’s, quality standards are what set them apart from other hospitals.
“Alegent got on the bandwagon with (quality) and we were not going to settle and consequently, I think we’ve shown that when you put your emphasis on something and then give people the tools to do it, it happens,” she said.
Midlands has received numerous quality awards, the most recent being the ACS MIDAS+ Platinum Quality Award.
“I’d like to think I played a little part in some of that. Because I was part of the foundation that built up so we could be where we are today. That’s very satisfying,” she said.
Although some days Bright says she wonders why she is retiring, she knows it’s the right move for her. She said she doesn’t remember as well as she used to and doesn’t want to make a mistake. She will stay on as PRN or “as needed” as a professional registered nurse because she said she couldn’t quite cut all her ties to Midlands. As PRN she will be available for special projects or team meetings.
Now that she will be retiring, Bright said that she and Dwayne are helping her brother remodel his house. Then the Brights will do some traveling. She is also interested in helping children in school reading programs, wants to find ways to help the Salvation Army and to continue staying active in church activities at Avery Presbyterian Church in Bellevue. She said maybe now she can start a parish nurse program she always wanted to do but the timing never seemed right.
“I’m especially looking forward to the trips,” she said.
Although their son, Darryl Bright and his daughter, Destiny, 16, live in Papillion, their daughter, DeAnn Bright lives in Charleston, S.C. where they plan to visit.
Bright said she realizes that she could have moved on from her job at Midlands a lot time ago, especially when financial troubles started popping up, but since she was there from the hospital’s “birth” she feels like a proud parent, watching the hospital mature and outgrow her.
“Here I had a chance to make a difference,” she said, “and that’s what people really want in their work. Some people just want a job — ‘put in my 8 to 4:30 and I’m out of here’ and never think about it again but if you’re having a career, you want whatever it is you’re doing to make a difference and I felt like I had that opportunity here. It’s been really great.”
Republished with permission from the Papillion Times
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