TRANSCRIPT: SUE MATTERN Interviewee: Interviewer: Sue Mattern Jennifer Donnally Interview Date: February 16, 2010 Location: Length: Chapel Hill, North Carolina One audio file, approximately 72 minutes START OF INTERVIEW Jennifer Donnally: Good morning. This is Jennifer Donnally. Today is February 16, it s a Tuesday, and I m in Sue Mattern s home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and it s a little past 10:00 AM in the morning. Today we re going to do a nice interview about the North Carolina Memorial Hospital Volunteer Auxiliary. So my first question is, where did you grow up and what was your childhood like? Sue Mattern: Yes, well I grew up in Buffalo, New York. JD: Ooh, it s cold up there. SM: Yes, it is. We had very cold winters. I remember that a lot. I would say I had a very normal childhood in a nice neighborhood where there were lots of children. It was a very diverse neighborhood. I think one of the things I do remember is we had so much freedom back in those days, way back then. We could ride our bike everywhere, we could roller skate wherever we wanted to, we could just do so much. We were outside all the time. Wintertime, a lot of ice skating, sledding, summertime, in little backyard pools and just always having a lot of fun. The school I went to was Kindergarten through eighth grade and we walked to school, of course; home for lunch,
Sue Mattern 2 back to school again. When I graduated from eighth grade we did move out to the suburbs of Buffalo, so I went to high school in a different area, and that was not a diverse neighborhood. That was really pretty much white middle class. But it was great, loved it; had a great time. So it was, I would say, a very normal childhood for that time. JD: What made you go then to college at the University of Colorado in Boulder? SM: Yes. I had a friend who started the year before I did and she just raved about it. She said what a wonderful place it was. I had applied to places in the east and small colleges and just decided I wanted to do something different, see a different part of the country, and I went out there sight unseen and loved it. JD: It s a beautiful town. SM: Yes, it is. JD: What was it like when you went to college there? SM: Well, there were probably about ten thousand students. It was a lot of outof-state people at that time. I compare it often to UNC, and of course UNC is mostly instate, and Colorado is now too, but back then they encouraged out of state students, again for having a diverse student body. Boulder was a fairly small town, beautiful campus, and it was a good experience. JD: Have you been back since to see all the changes? SM: One time, and my husband s never been to Boulder. This was several years ago, and I could see a lot of changes, a lot of growth in the town, a lot of growth on the campus, but it was still the same beautiful place it s always been. JD: That s where my brother lives and he won t ever move away from Boulder,-- SM: Oh, really?
Sue Mattern 3 JD: --because it s his dream spot. He ll never move. [Laughs] SM: I can understand that. Of course we ve become so here in Chapel Hill. We love Chapel Hill, we love UNC, and we wouldn t leave here. But I understand. Boulder is a wonderful place. JD: When did you come down to Chapel Hill then, or what brought you to Chapel Hill? SM: My husband is a physician and in 1973 we arrived. He was recruited down here. He s a nephrologist and he was recruited down here to be head of the dialysis area here. JD: Okay. So you ve seen Chapel Hill grow and expand and change. SM: Yes, very much so. JD: So you came down in 1973. When did you get interested in being a volunteer at the hospital? SM: I actually had volunteered in other places, as a hospital volunteer. Not a lot, because my kids were really little, but I tried to do it. It seemed like back then that hospital volunteering was the kind of volunteering to do. When you thought about volunteering it was hospital volunteering, and of course with Bill in the hospital and medically and so on. But I had worked in a hospital before we had a children as a research assistant in a lab, so I wasn t actually in the hospital but all these labs were close to patient areas, so that s just what I gravitated toward, hospital volunteering. JD: So what was North Carolina Memorial Hospital like when you first came in, or what were your impressions of it?
Sue Mattern 4 SM: Well, at that time it was a research and teaching hospital and a referral hospital for the state. I was trying to think back. In [19]73 we did have the Bed Tower and of course East and West, but that was really it as far as hospital beds were concerned, so it wasn t all that big. It was one lobby. Then suddenly there was expansion of Anderson, and then much later, children s, women s, and of course now our new cancer hospital. It s been a tremendous growth in this time. Let s see, that s been over thirtyfive years. It s just been an amazing expansion. But then our population has grown and we of course are still the referral hospital for the state of North Carolina. Yeah, so I ve seen major changes here. [Laughs] JD: [Laughs] Who were some of the other volunteers that you--? Did you get recruited into a volunteer or did you just show up and say, I want to volunteer? SM: No, actually it s interesting. When we first moved here I was very involved with the children, some other community activities, the school activities in particular. A friend in the neighborhood whose husband was also a physician at the hospital said, You know what? Your youngest daughter s now in first grade and we do these second grade tours. Next year she ll be doing a tour. I think you should come in and I think you ll find you d like to do that. That s actually what brought me in, was coming in encouraged by this friend to do the school tours, so that s how I started, back in about 1975. JD: So the school tours, is that part of the hospital s outreach in terms of-- SM: Yes, it is. JD: --trying to foster-- SM: Yes.
Sue Mattern 5 JD: --professionalism and increase--? So that s where you began. What was it like? What were the second graders like? Were they big eyed? SM: Oh, yes, very much so, and they still are. Yes, oh yes. They love coming and there s a couple of things. One it s good PR for the community and it is an outreach program and the former DVS [Director of Volunteer Services], two DVS s ago, Elaine Hill--that s the person I really wish were still here with us, because she would have been a wealth of knowledge--she just felt that this was an important thing to do in the community. It s really become a very important field trip for second graders in the community. We started out just doing Chapel Hill/Carrboro schools and then they expanded to Orange County as well. The children over the years have probably become much more sophisticated and knowing a lot more. A lot of times they re watching these TV programs that are set in hospitals and so on. But they ve always been very curious, good questions, love seeing the whole place, and then we usually get letters or pictures back of what they really liked, and it s very interesting what impressions we make, or the hospital makes. Often it s things you really wouldn t think about. We take them up to see the helicopter, they see the emergency department, they see a lot of things, and a lot of times it s something very small that they remember, you know, seeing X-rays or whatever. It s very interesting. Now this year we haven t done them because of the Swine Flu. They have not let children come in the hospital, which has been too bad. JD: Well if you started in 1975 doing the tours with the children does that mean you got to know many people in the hospital? My dad s a director of volunteers back in our home city-- SM: Okay.
Sue Mattern 6 JD: --and there are certain jobs where you literally get the whole hospital circuit and get to know all the nurses, all the physicians, somewhat. SM: Yeah. Not so much through the school tours because there are only so many places you can take the children and there are a lot of places you can t, simply for disease control and so on. There are a couple of other jobs I did, or volunteer positions I had, where I got to know more people. Many years we owned all the televisions in the hospital so for a fundraising thing we went around and collected money from the patients in order for them to have a TV. That s when you really get to know staff and you get to know more patients. So that I did, and then we decided, you know what, this is just a real hassle, [Laughs] going around and asking patients for money for the TV. We finally just turned it over to the hospital and said, you know what, you just take over. You can have the TVs. Carry on with this. I think finally they just--it s there. There s no extra cost to it; it s nothing. It just really got to be too much. After that we used to take a big cart around. There would be two people taking what we called the hospitality cart or the shopping cart around. We went from floor to floor and we went door to door and knocked and said, Anything from the cart? and a lot of times it was more the nurses who wanted--. They can t get off the floor and so you bring a candy bar or something and they were very happy to have that. That s when you really get to know more people, at least by sight, and, Hello, how are you today? and that kind of thing. JD: It was so funny when I was doing the research and I hit the TV program, that s when I realized--. I was like, really? That was for me when I was like, hospitals have changed a lot. [Laughs]
Sue Mattern 7 SM: A lot, yeah. JD: To think that most patients didn t have televisions when they were recovering; didn t have that sort of distraction. SM: That s right. JD: And then for a while that you had to pay for it-- SM: I know. JD: --and have the service brought to you. SM: Yes. It was just kind of archaic in a way. We had over the years bought a lot of TVs. I mean besides patient rooms we had provided them in waiting rooms, recovery rooms, all kinds of areas. We still get requests for TVs, but not for hospital rooms. But, yeah, it is a wonderful diversion. Of course now a lot of them come with DVDs attached so they can watch movies or whatever. JD: So you began volunteering with the second graders. Who did you meet and what made you really love the experience so that you continued to volunteer at the hospital? SM: Well, obviously I met a lot of other volunteers, and we just had a lot in common. I felt like we really want[ed] to do the same types of volunteering and we had the same goals and so on. It didn t take long before I was on their board. JD: It doesn t take long to rise up in the volunteer ranks. [Laughs] SM: No. [Laughs] Not at all. A couple of years later I was on the board, and those folks, we really got to know each other very well. Ann McLendon is an example. We ve been friends all this time and just continued, I mean not just seeing each other as volunteers in the hospital but socially, having lunch together, doing lots of stuff together.
Sue Mattern 8 I don t know. It kept me going because I really enjoyed the people. Elaine Hill and I became very good friends. The next DVS was Betty Hutton and she and I had worked together very closely in United Way in Chapel Hill before she ever became the director of volunteer services at the hospital, so she was a very good friend. I ve gotten to know the current director of volunteer services, Linda Bowles, very well. The people are wonderful; we all seem to have the same reasons for being there, to help the institution and so on. JD: One of the things I noticed was that particularly at the beginning, which was twenty years before when you started volunteering,-- SM: Right. JD: --but many of the volunteers happened to be the spouses of physicians and surgeons at the hospital. SM: Right and that was very typical back in that day. In fact that was one of your questions, you know, who were the volunteers, and basically that was true. Now there were a lot of other people but yes, a lot of doctors wives wanted to volunteer and get involved, partly because they liked that environment and they wanted to have some feeling for what their husbands were about and doing and so on. Back in those days not too many women were doing other things. They were not professionals in other ways, and that made a difference too. Now you see a lot of our volunteers are retired from a profession. We have a lot more men volunteering and that s obviously after they ve retired, so it s very different. But yes, back in those days it was mothers whose kids were in school and they had the time then, mornings, afternoons, whatever, to come in and do this.
Sue Mattern 9 JD: What was your first day as a volunteer like? SM: [Laughs] Well I was trying to remember about that. Obviously it was in doing a school tour. I can t really remember other than I m sure I just followed along that day because I didn t really know what I was doing, and I think that s what people find a lot for their first day of volunteering. You just follow around. Somebody helps you do what you re supposed to be learning how to do. One of the things that I think really is hard for people is learning their way around, and when you re doing school tours you do need to know where you re going. And of course the hospital was fairly small back then so that didn t really affect us too much, but you really have to concentrate not only on what you re telling the children, where you re taking them, and how to get there, and that s kind of overwhelming at first. I know there re a lot of people nowadays who shy away from volunteering simply because they say, Oh, my goodness, I could never find my way through that hospital, or hospitals, plural. JD: This is getting a little bit more--. We touched upon it with the televisions. The Auxiliary actually donates quite a bit to the hospital,-- SM: Oh, yes. JD: --fundraises and then donates whatever it fundraises, in many ways providing needs at the hospital. SM: That s true. JD: It s almost like the hospital counts on its donations as part of its functioning. SM: Mm hmm. JD: So I wanted to ask you a little bit more about that relationship and how that s negotiated between the board and the hospital board or how those things play out.
Sue Mattern 10 SM: Yes. Well I ve been treasurer for a long time. JD: Okay, so you really do know this. SM: Yes. We have a finance committee and the finance committee first of all does the budget once a year. We have lots of different standard things we give to every year. We also have an area that we call special requested gifts, and staff, departments, pretty much anybody can make a special request. Many times we do struggle over, Is this something we feel we want to do, should do, or is this the hospital s responsibility? We oftentimes will say back to a department, Shouldn t the hospital be paying for this? Sometimes it s very obvious that they should be and that s where they should be going. What they usually tell us is: It s not in our budget this year. We didn t budget for it; we can t do it; we can t expand our budget. You know [they can] always cut down budgets, and so on. So we do the best we can. We ve only got so much money and so we try very hard to provide for a lot of things, but every once in a while we do--. And we will ask people to come in and explain more about whatever it is they re doing and why this can t be part of the hospital expenses. We feel very good about what we do. We really do. We just feel like we can enhance the patients stay in the hospital, we can enhance the staffs working, day-to-day life, so we try to do it in cooperation with the hospital and sometimes we just have to kind of figure how we re going to work that out with them. JD: Or how to say no politely sometimes. SM: We do say no. Yes, we do say no. Yes, and there are some things--. What we ve found lately--and this is wonderful and I think you have a question about this later- -they are trying so hard to do more than just take care of the patients needs and get them well. They look at the patient as a whole person and they re trying so many other things,
Sue Mattern 11 like art and music and other kinds of ways of trying to help the patient physically, mentally, whatever, get better, so we re asked to a lot of this sort of thing--art therapy, art expression, buying drums. It s just amazing to me that the staff is able to think about these things, that this is what we need to be doing and then ask us, because it isn t in the budget, to help them with, and we love doing that. It s wonderful to be able to do that. JD: Well and this gets to the two purposes of the Auxiliary which is to increase patient care, and--. SM: Right. JD: Not increase, improve patient care and then outreach to the community. SM: Exactly. JD: So do you want to comment a little bit more about how over the years that you ve been involved patient care has been improved and what ways the Auxiliary has accomplished that? SM: Yeah. Well of course there s the obvious of the improvement in medical care and just the advances they ve made in medical care, but too over the years they have improved the whole physical place where the patients are, where the patients have to be while they re recuperating and getting better. When you think about way back it seems like in the dark ages when there were wards and all this; no privacy, nothing. Now almost all our rooms are private rooms and they re just very nice rooms. They re decorated, they ve got light, they ve got all the modern anything could want, and we can help out in many ways with that. We used to decorate. We used to do a lot of things which we don t have to do anymore. [Laughs] You know walking into the hospitals now- -and I don t know if you get over there much but you probably do--the lobbies don t look
Sue Mattern 12 like hospital lobbies. They look almost like hotel lobbies and they ve just made--. They re airy, they re light, they ve got trees, they ve got comfortable chairs, and all sorts of things to make it look not like an institution. That s a big part of it. They re trying very hard not to have it look like an institution, so there s pictures on the walls, there s murals, there s all kinds of things. JD: When you arrived were there many female physicians or was it mostly male physicians? SM: It was male dominated, absolutely. JD: And was it mostly a female volunteer corps? SM: Oh, yes. We ve changed our name many, many times, because we did start out as the Women s Auxiliary, then we went to Auxiliary, and then people felt like well, auxiliary really does have this connotation of female, women, helping their husbands or whatever, so we changed our name to the Volunteer Association. Of course then we ve had to change it from North Carolina Memorial Hospital Volunteer Association to UNC Hospitals Volunteer Association, to UNC Healthcare Volunteer Association, on and on. Whenever the hospitals change their name then we change. So, yes, we definitely--. I mean it was a rare thing to have a man volunteering. Now we have retired physicians, we have all kinds of people, and a lot of couples come in to volunteer together, which is so nice, doing the library cart or whatever, or doing different things. They don t necessarily come in to volunteer and do the same thing. I have some neighbors and she used to do patient relations and he used to do newspapers, and I think he s still doing newspapers and she switched to something else, but that s the kind of thing, where couples do that at either the same time or whatever, and that s very nice to see.
Sue Mattern 13 JD: How did physicians treat volunteers in the 1970s and 1980s, and has it changed compared to how physicians treat volunteers today? SM: That s an interesting question. Volunteers have always been appreciated in the hospital. I don t know. There was not whole lot of interaction between physicians and volunteers and now there is some more of that and we hear more about how much we re appreciated by many of the physicians. We, of course, hear that from other staff as well. Physicians, they have so many other things they re thinking about and having to deal with, but I would say they always knew we were there, and of course a lot of them knew their wives were there volunteering. But I don t know how much that has changed other than maybe a little bit more recognition from physicians. JD: Did the volunteering help socialize and consolidate a community around the hospital of both physicians and then their wives who then got to know each other through the Volunteer Association? I guess at that time it would have been Auxiliary at that point still. SM: Probably way back, yeah. Way back it was Auxiliary. I would say that did not happen that much. There was a lot of socializing that departments would do and then the wives obviously were involved, so a lot of the volunteers that I knew way back our husbands may have been working in the same department, Medicine or whatever, and you d see them at that kind of socializing, but it never worked the other way. Now volunteers wanted to have some socialization. They wanted to make volunteers feel included in I would say a volunteer family as opposed to physicians wives and that kind of a family. I ll tell you a little bit of something else. It first started with [Reese and Norma Berryhill in 1952] --now we weren t here. [Laughs] He came down as the
Sue Mattern 14 original dean of the medical school and he and his wife were very [involved]. She got involved in the Volunteer Auxiliary way back and they were very much into trying to bring everybody together socializing and so on. By the time we got here that was not so much the case. We felt like if people came to the community and wanted to volunteer that was probably one of their ways of learning about the community, getting involved in the community. We wanted to make sure it was not just coming in and working three hours one day a week and going home and not ever seeing these people. So we started doing various other kinds of things, trying to get people together, a holiday party, or the hospital of course always gives us a recognition or appreciation luncheon once a year, and other kinds of ways of getting people together. We now do what we call Lunch and Learn, so people get together and we have lunch and somebody comes and is a speaker and everybody is invited, so those kind of things are probably the way we try to socialize and get people feeling like they are part of something bigger than just coming in and volunteering three hours a week. JD: I wanted to see if you could tell me a little bit more about the different kinds of--maybe units is the word? You talked about the newspaper cart; you talked about the hospitality cart; you talked about where exactly when you become a volunteer, how it s expanded in terms of opportunities and forms of volunteering,-- SM: Right, exactly. JD: --where you direct, how that s changed over the years and what s available for volunteers. SM: Huge, huge changes there. When I first started we had that TV service, we had school tours, we had the hospitality cart, and of course we had a shop, a small shop at
Sue Mattern 15 that time, and so people volunteered there. I know there were other things people did but it wasn t--. Oh, and in the ICU waiting rooms and in the emergency room people helped out there. It was sort of the standard things. If you re working in the ICU waiting room or surgery waiting room you just help keep people informed about what was going on, the families and so on, and mak[e] sure that there was communication back and forth and tell them things. We used to have people working at the information desk as well and admitting and those kinds of things, which are pretty standard. Nowadays, volunteers work in labs. They work up on the floors doing many more things. There s just a lot more opportunities. I honestly don t even know all the opportunities that are out there. Oh, another one that has always been big is working with children. We have cuddlers and we have storytellers and so on. Now, my goodness, people take art carts around and work with the kids and the adults. It s amazing. Some people who ve had background in it go and work in some of the labs and what have you. You come in and you don t really know what you want to do, there s this laundry list almost of things you can get involved in, and when they have their interview they talk to them about what interests you, what do you want to do, kind of thing. It s amazing. And of course we have our UNC students who come in and volunteer and they do many more specific things because they re looking for health careers or, Do I want to be a physician? Do I want to be a nurse? Do I want to do this? Do I want to do that? and this is a wonderful time for them to get that experience. JD: The UNC students were always there but really increased during your time in the 1970s, also with the rise of the healthcare profession in many ways,-- SM: Right.
Sue Mattern 16 JD: --in terms of the schools and the number of people being taught. One of the general things I wanted to ask you is what are some of the changes that you ve noticed and the advantages in the changing nature of who is a volunteer, who s being recruited in and who does volunteer and why they volunteer? SM: Right. Well as I said we have a lot more retirees who bring their professional expertise with them, which can be very helpful. Sometimes they don t really want to do something necessarily that s totally related but for instance, Barbara Irwin, who I know you have talked to, and she having been a professional librarian and archivist and so on has done wonders with our library. It s just been amazing how she s been able to organize it and do so much more with it. That s just one example. Other people, we have a lady who works in the gift shop and she ran a shop for many years, so we have people who have some knowledge that they can bring to their volunteering, and that s very helpful. I would say that was a major change and a lot of the men who come in now, a lot of them have been in business and we try to get them on our finance committee. We really appreciate their expertise in a business sense. That I would say is a major change. JD: It seems to still be run by a corps of women, even as the men are coming in, but the director of volunteer services--. Has there ever been a male director of volunteer services? SM: No. We ve only had four directors. JD: I was going to say, there haven t been that many. SM: No. The first lady who was there was not there too long and then they recruited Elaine Hill, and she d been a volunteer before she became the DVS, and she
Sue Mattern 17 was there a long, long time, and then Betty Hutton and then Linda Bowles. I mean [Sighs] we don t mean to have it be a female organization. That s just so traditional. We ve had men as president of the board and we try to encourage men to be on our leadership council and on the finance committee or wherever they d like to be, and there are some things that seem to fit well for them. We have as you know a lifeline program and we really have to have men be the ones who go out and install and get everything organized for the person in their home with the phone and all the things that are involved with that. You ve got to kind of have a man s ability to do that. I don t mean that to be against what women can do but they just seem to be able to do that better. I don t know. There s some jobs that are just oriented toward women. I don t know. JD: I was going to ask you this in a little bit. How about the UNC students? Are those more of an equal, because-- SM: I think so. JD: --they re all going for the health careers. SM: Yeah. JD: They re all ambitious. SM: They re all ambitious, but we do find some of them like working in the gift shop. It really just depends. I would have thought that most of them would want to be working somewhere where they are learning about a health career. Some of them really just want to volunteer the same way we do. JD: The Volunteer Association takes pride in being a diverse organization, at least in their records. Did they do any initiatives to create that diversity? SM: Diversity as far as the membership goes?
Sue Mattern 18 JD: Membership, in terms of gender, race, class backgrounds. SM: You know we don t have much control over that. Anybody now who comes in and volunteers is a member of our Volunteer Association, so there s never been a traditional number--. The tradition has not been for black people, for instance, African Americans, to volunteer in the hospital. They volunteer in their church. They find other ways that they want to volunteer. We do have some. We have some that have been there for a long time, but I don t think it s their thing. If they re going to volunteer it s going to be more within their own neighborhoods and their churches and so on, and it s not that we discourage it. We encourage them to come. A lot of times because of economical reasons they can t volunteer, and that s a big issue. That s even an issue with some of the people working in the hospital. They see people coming in and volunteering their time and they don t have to be out there working, and there can be a little friction there. One thing we have to be very careful about is not taking over an area where there have been paid people and it can be a volunteer thing, and there can be friction there. We have to be very careful that we re not taking anybody s jobs away from them. We re coming in to augment, that kind of thing, help, but not--. JD: Have there been any instances of that? Can you give me a little more information on the friction? SM: Well, personally I ve not experienced that but I do know that sometimes, like working with people sitting at the information desk. They tend to ignore the volunteer. The volunteer can be helpful to them but they re afraid of infringement and that the volunteer s going to say, I can do that better. I don t know really, but I have heard
Sue Mattern 19 rumblings about that. I don t know whether the paid person is just a little bit afraid of the volunteer and what they can do and what they might want to do and so on. JD: Okay. I m going to change gears a little bit and ask you more about patient care. Who are the patients who come to the UNC hospital system? SM: Yes. Now there s diversity. [Laughs] JD: [Laughs] SM: There s diversity, yes. It s just amazing because we get people from all over the state, and sometimes out of state, and sometimes they come with a family member and sometimes they come alone. We get people who come in who have never even been in a building like our building. They ve never ridden an escalator, and they come in and they re sick and they re frightened and they don t necessarily know what s wrong with them and then you expect them to navigate our system and it s extremely difficult, extremely difficult. We have a lot of people who are also there who are fine with the system, have plenty of support, have families, and of course for local people who are very fortunate to have this hospital where it is because we can go in and we can get well cared for and our families are here and it all works very well. Another thing that I think the volunteers should be very proud of is that when--. Several years ago we started getting Hispanic people and they couldn t speak English and we started the interpreters program as volunteers. People would come in as a volunteer and interpret, and it was mostly Spanish. Now we have lots of languages and we still have some volunteers but it s become such a large program that they ve actually taken it away from volunteers and given it to Patient Relations and they have a lot of paid interpreters now. That s just been amazing to me, and a lot of people who volunteer have tried to learn a few phrases in
Sue Mattern 20 Spanish so when they talk to people they can communicate the best way they can. So we have diversity with the rural people coming in, poor people, the different nationalities; a lot of diversity. JD: It s interesting. You brought up the issue of starting a volunteer program that eventually evolved into a paid program in the hospital. SM: Mm hmm. JD: Are there other instances of that happening, where the volunteers took the lead on an innovative program and then the hospital incorporated it and brought in paid staff? SM: They re probably out there. I can t offhand think of many things. I ll think about that. I can t really come up with other things, except for instance way back there might not have been a Patient Relations program and that was a volunteer program and then it evolved into a different whole department with somebody who manages that, that kind of thing. JD: Do you have any particular patients that you remember or stories that really come to mind vividly in terms of helping a certain patient out? SM: You know I never really did one-on-one with patients. I guess taking the hospitality cart around was probably where I really would talk to people. A lot of times all people wanted was just to talk, so you d be in there and you d sit there and you d talk with them for awhile, especially with nobody there. A lot of times we d do that and we d run little errands but specifically I can t picture one person, but you just tried to do whatever you could do that would help the person: mail a letter for them; do this; do that; run down to the shop and get something for them, that kind of thing.
Sue Mattern 21 JD: Did any interactions with patients or even seeing the patients you were serving as a volunteer start changing any of your ideas about issues of class and poverty in North Carolina and broadly? SM: You became more aware that there was a lot of poverty in North Carolina and there were a lot of rural people out there that weren t--. Obviously if they came here they couldn t be taken care of in their small community and therefore they had to come to Chapel Hill. Yes, and then as the years went on we saw so many more Hispanic people and we said, Wait a minute. Where are all these people coming from and why are they coming here? Of course a lot of them were farm workers and so on. I found that to be even more dramatic than the poor rural people that were coming in, was just all of a sudden this huge influx of Hispanics coming in, and of course a lot of them were young people and basically they were coming in to have babies, that sort of thing. I found that very interesting, and then other nationalities too coming in, so we were getting a lot more diversity in that way in North Carolina. It just wasn t Southern folk who d lived here all their lives; it was folks moving here and becoming part of a community and then if they got sick they were coming here. JD: Okay. Well these are kind of the big ones. I think you re going to have a lot to say on this, which is you ve carefully watched how the healthcare profession s evolved since the beginning of volunteering, so what are some of the big changes you would like to address or explore, things that you ve noticed, even at this hospital? SM: Yes, as far as, well doctors, nurses, the whole profession, right? JD: Mm hmm.
Sue Mattern 22 SM: I thought about this when I saw this in the number of questions and I made some notes on that. Staff has always been concerned about patients in general. Many years ago they really focused on disease, making the patient better. That s all they focused on. The major thing I have seen happen is trying to deal with the whole person, becoming much more aware that you re not just dealing with the disease, or a cure for the disease or an operation and getting better from an operation, or long term people with diabetes or kidney failure or whatever it happens to be, but you re there trying to work with the whole patient. We touched on this earlier, with people trying to bring in much more things that you never would have thought about doing many years ago, so I see it as much more caring in certain ways. I won t say that they weren t caring before but they ve changed their perspective or added to their perspective. I think that goes along with the Patient Relations, HIPAA, patients rights, all [those things] ha[ve] just been major improvements. Just concern from the patient s perspective about various things that they wouldn t necessarily think about because they ve, for instance, never been in that situation. They ve maybe never been a patient and they don t really know how patients are perceiving the staff and so on, which is all so positive. It s very nice to see all that happening. JD: Yeah, that would be a huge thing. How about in terms of do you think that anything shifted in the medical community once more women and minorities started becoming physicians? SM: Being much more open, yeah, probably that s true, that we have well females, for one thing, women physicians. We touched on that. Like in my husband s class there may have been three out of over a hundred, women, and they weren t treated
Sue Mattern 23 well. They were not treated well. Now over fifty percent are women in the classes, and that s wonderful. Maybe that s even helped with the more--. I don t know what I want to say. JD: Seeing the patient as a whole person. SM: Yes. I think so, and empathy and so on. So--tell me the question again. The question was? JD: It was sort of more about do you think that--? SM: Oh, because of minorities coming in and so on. JD: And women, sort of the changing nature of who is a doctor. How has that affected patient care? SM: Yeah, I do think with women it s been the empathy and the caring. I m not saying men aren t empathetic or whatever. I mean obviously with trying to get more minorities to become physicians. I mean the medical school here has really worked on that very hard, to get more minorities to become physicians, and that s helped because they have a different perspective. Women have a different perspective. All the minorities have, you know, they come from different backgrounds and they know how it is to have grown up in a different type of community and so on. So, yeah, it has changed and it s improved. JD: This is an interesting question. I don t know how to quite phrase it. How about the rise in bureaucracy in the hospital, or is that a perception? To increase patient care there s been multiple departments splitting and then record keeping and sort of this rise and expansion?
Sue Mattern 24 SM: Yes. Well one of the things at the hospital that s always been a problem is of course the accounting, and that still gets to people. They just cannot understand how these bills can get so messed up and all this kind of thing. Then the recent things about co-payments and all this, that they re wanting people to pay up front and do all these kind of things and people can t do that, and we take care of supposedly anybody who walks in our door whether they can pay or they can t pay. So the bureaucracy, I suppose it s good in some ways and in some ways. That s a one step removal from the patient, with so much of that. If we could only make our hospital more like a community hospital, which is impossible to do, but if you could just have more of an intimate kind of feeling about the hospital, but it s so large that s impossible. But I think the bureaucracy comes in there. There s just so many people out there and everybody has their own things that they re trying to do in the hospital, their own goals, and a lot of times goals get into conflict. The more the people are out there in the administration and so on, the harder it is to have it kind of be cohesive, and we run into that a lot as a volunteer association, with the bureaucracy in the administration, so that can be difficult. JD: Can you explain a little bit more? SM: Well, I can. Your last question was, if I were in charge--. [Laughs] JD: At the hospital, what would you do? SM: And of course I can only look at this from a volunteer s perspective. Volunteers would like to see a better partnership between the administration and the volunteer department and we fight this all the time, or we struggle with it all the time, I guess I should say. They recognize us and they thank us but nowadays--. Volunteers back in the [19]50s were looked at as blue-haired ladies in pink smocks, just there to do
Sue Mattern 25 good and I can still picture some of them, [Laughs] and they were wonderful people. We re just there to do good; that s what we want to do. JD: And then the candy striper, a young girl who s volunteering and doing the same thing. SM: Exactly. We are very professional now and knowledgeable and worldly and feel like that we can offer a whole lot more than they re willing to accept, and we fight that all the time. They continue to do things that intimately involve us or impact us and don t consult us, so if I were in charge I would certainly have volunteers be much more of a partnership. In some ways I think they think we are a partnership, but we don t see it that way. We really don t, and it s really too bad. In the [19]50s, fine, they just wanted to come in and do this and that, but it s so much more sophisticated now, everything. Finances, everything is so much more sophisticated. We have retired nurses who work as volunteers and have gotten involved in leadership positions and they know what they re talking about. [Laughs] There s no doubt about that. And in my experience, having done it for so many years, we do know what we re talking about and they don t always listen. JD: Can you tell me, maybe elaborate on one or two instances of where the hospital assumes you re partners and you don t necessarily share that assumption with them? SM: Yes, recently. We do of course as you know a lot of fundraising, but our fundraising we do not do outside the hospital. We do not have balls. We do not have golf tournaments. We don t do any of that because all these others, like Ronald McDonald House, Family House, they do all that. They have those things and we aren t going to infringe on what they want to do so we have our shop and we have what we call
Sue Mattern 26 these vendor sales. Vendors come in and offer goods to anybody who wants to buy but we get a commission off of that and staff are allowed to what they call payroll deduct. It s wonderful for them because they have an interest free loan of whatever because they start paying it back from the payroll but it s spread out over four or six payrolls. So if they put it on their VISA and can t pay off their VISA obviously they have interest charges. Well they don t when they do it through payroll deduction, so people love it. So that s our major ways of making our goals for fundraising. But we did have a coffee shop that for ten years we got a percentage of their profits because they were in our space. And staff loved the coffee, the staff was great, and we didn t have to do anything except accept a check. Occasionally if there was a problem we would try to deal with it or our DVS would deal with it. We got fifty thousand dollars a year from that. I know that there were a lot of reasons for this but [the hospital] decided that they didn t really want him there anymore so they basically got rid of him. [They] us[ed] the fact that Starbucks was coming into the cancer hospital that they couldn t have him there, which was very close, physically close, to where he was. But it was a done deal and we had nothing to say about it, and that was very, very upsetting. We could have moved him if it was physically too close to where the cancer hospital was. We could have moved him, but they, you know. So those are the kind of things. And then we have these vendor sales and we have a person coming in selling uniforms and everybody loves it because they get great uniforms at a good price and so on and so forth. Then the nursing staff decided that they were going to have the nurses have to wear a certain color, so they were going to give them vouchers to buy three sets
Sue Mattern 27 of these uniforms and they chose a shop somewhere, and our person who does ours wanted to be part of this and he wasn t able. It s things like that where they don t consult us. What they don t realize is that whatever money we don t raise for them is their loss. It s our loss too but because we turn everything back to the hospital it s their loss. We don t have the money to give you. We re sorry; we can t do all the programs that we would love to do: scholarship, patient care, outreach, whatever. So those are the kind of things. JD: They just come from somewhere and, chop, the decision has been made and you had no input. SM: Yeah, and we try. We try to go back and say, You need to rethink this, but. JD: But it doesn t happen that way. SM: No, it doesn t happen. But let me add too that things have changed over the years. When Elaine Hill was here and Eric Munson was the president of the hospital, or the CEO, things really didn t get away from us like they have recently, and I don t blame our current DVS or our former DVS but it just seemed like there was more inclusion in things. So it hasn t always been that way, but the bureaucracy that we were talking about before is a lot of it. There s just so many more people and everybody has their own agenda and so on. JD: Well I m trying to think--. Do you have anything that you really want to speak about or talk about, before I start doing the wrap up questions? SM: I can look through the notes that I made. We ve covered an awful lot of the questions that you, and the things I wrote down. I don t know that I do. We talked about
Sue Mattern 28 the patients and who comes to the hospital. All along we ve had good relationships with the hospital I would say, in general, very good relationships, and one of your questions that we didn t talk about was between the hospital and the Auxiliary--. Well actually I guess my thoughts here would be there s always been a lot of sometimes good, sometimes bad, not with us but between departments of volunteer services and an auxiliary or a volunteer association and how do those two blend and work with each other and help each other, or do they really go in opposite directions. JD: What s the difference between those, because I was running into that and I-- SM: Exactly. JD: --didn t know if they--? How does that work? SM: Okay. Way back when mostly we had just people coming into the hospital and they d form an auxiliary and they d do what they could in the hospital but there was no department within the hospital that dealt with volunteers, because probably there were only a few volunteers doing this and it wasn t a big deal. There weren t all these regulations that they now have for what you have to go through to become a volunteer, with references, and background checks, and orientations, and re-orientations [Laughs] and all the stuff that you have to go through, and medical, everything that you have to go through to become a volunteer. You can do it and it s not that hard but it s a progression of things to do, so there s no way that, quote, Volunteers themselves can handle all this. They started to need a department and that s what became the Department of Volunteer Services. The director is a department chair and she is a paid person. We have four paid people now in the office, we re going to get another one, and that s to run the adult program, the UNC program, the junior program, and everything else that comes into
Sue Mattern 29 that department. They re there every day and they re paid and so on and so forth, and volunteers come and go. The leadership group of the volunteer association works very closely with the DVS and the other people and we do a lot of things jointly. A lot of things are totally the Department of Volunteer Services, things they have to comply with and so on, and a lot of things are just things that we do, but most things are done with some collaboration, support, whatever. We have always gotten along very well with our Department of Volunteer Services. I have known places where they re at odds and they really have a hard time, and a lot of that s personality. There will be a strong president of the volunteer group and they want to run everything but they ve got a department over here who has to answer to the hospital. It can get very tricky trying to keep these groups happy and working together, between administration and auxiliary or volunteer association and the department of volunteer services. We ve always had a very good relationship and that should be noted because it s never been adversarial. Some of it started with Elaine Hill who started as a volunteer and then she became a director, so she knew that perspective. Of course Betty Hutton worked with the United Way so she d worked with volunteers for a long time, but she also did a lot of volunteering herself, not so much in the hospital but in other organizations in the community. I think that makes a big difference. We ve just been very fortunate that we ve always had a good relationship, and you can get a lot more done that way too. JD: It s good for the patients. SM: And good for the patients, absolutely, yeah. JD: What have been some of the Volunteer Association s greatest challenges since you began volunteering?
Sue Mattern 30 SM: Oh, my. Well I think in the beginning a challenge is always just finding enough volunteers, getting out there and recruiting volunteers, although as we said in the beginning it seemed like people gravitated toward a hospital to do volunteering. Over the years it s always been we need more volunteers, we need more volunteers. How are we going to get these people working? Because you think about it, like for instance just take the ICU waiting room. If you have somebody there in the morning and the afternoon, and they certainly would like an evening person, you need ten people a week at least, ten volunteers dedicated to doing that, and sometimes that just doesn t happen. Same with the Emergency Department, you need morning, afternoon, every day of the week, so you ve got a lot of slots to fill. People come and go. Nowadays a lot of people come; they re not working temporarily and they volunteer for awhile and then they get a job and they go off, which is great. That s fine. If people can come and even if they can just stay for a little while that s wonderful, but it used to be people almost made it--like myself. I volunteered for years and years and years, and we have people like that who come, but people finally get tired of it or you get older and you can t go around the hospital so much. As a school tour guide we walk all over the hospital and we run into situations where--. One thing about doing the hospital tours is that we just never know what s going to happen. You never know with a child, you never know when you get to an area Are we going to be able to get in or not get in? especially in the Emergency Department. You have to really be thinking on your feet all the time about how to adjust things and how to do things and whatever and some people don t like that, [Laughs] which I understand. I understand that. And as I say they age out. People just get so: I just can t do this anymore. So it s always looking for volunteers.