Health Care Heroes: Bev O’Gorman
Bev O’Gorman has worked in just about every nursing environment imaginable while making a difference all over the world – Sudan, Mozambique, Honduras, back to Sudan and the list could go on. But now she’s back where she wants to be, at Community Medical Center-Oakhurst.
O’Gorman started her health care career as a technician at the Oakhurst facility before going to school to become a registered nurse, and then working more than three years in Community Regional Medical Center’s emergency department.
 |
| Bev O'Gorman |
With her emergency duties serving as a great learning experience, O’Gorman decided to make her impact felt globally. So she joined Samaritan’s Purse, an international Christian relief and evangelism organization that provides spiritual and physical aid to victims of war, poverty, natural disaster and disease.
“I felt like it was something that I always wanted to do to make a difference,” O’Gorman said. “I used my nursing to make people’s lives a little better. When I knew I was going to nursing school, I felt like God really put that on my heart.”
O’Gorman, 50, has been working for Community off and on since 1988. Today, she’s an immediate care nurse at the Oakhurst facility, while also providing per diem home health care in Oakhurst and working at Advanced Medical Imaging in Fresno once a week. But Oakhurst is home.
“One of the things I like up here is this is my community,” she said. “This is where I live, and I enjoy being able to do this in my community, see people I know from town or from church, and know I can do something to help them out. It’s more personal up here.”
Though Oakhurst doesn’t house a Level 1 trauma center like Community Regional does, O’Gorman said the staff there sees plenty of serious injuries, including accidents from logging, camping, watersports, chainsaws, horses and other “mountain stuff.”
Many of those patients are transferred “down the hill,” as O’Gorman called it, for higher-acuity care in downtown Fresno. And that’s what O’Gorman said is the biggest day-to-day challenge of being an immediate care nurse in Oakhurst – seeing patients who need intervention right away, but with fewer resources than Community Regional’s Level 1 trauma center.
“We just don’t have the backup here, so you really have to feel confident, and we have a really good team up here,” O’Gorman said. “It’s a great team of people who help each other out a lot. So when we get a trauma or a code that comes in, everybody jumps in.”
This story was reported by Eddie Hughes. He can be reached at eddieh@communitymedical.org.