Mary Foley, RN, patient care supervisor, has traveled all over the place, but has decided to make the cardiovascular lab at North Suburban Medical Center her home as well as her professional challenge. She said she’s had a great career in nursing, but nursing was not always a passion for her.

"There wasn’t really anything in particular that made me decide to go into nursing," she said. "It was 20 years ago and choices were, obviously, wide open to me, but I still felt at that point in my life I still felt that traditional line kind of being enforced. Women always went into nursing or teaching and men went into engineering.

"I didn’t really have another passion or want for something else to do, so nursing just kind of came into its own, but it’s been a wonderful career."

Foley earned her RN licensure from Blackhawk Technical Institute in Wisconsin. After earning her degree, Foley said she had a little trouble finding work. "After I graduated, and it’s kind of hard to believe at this point in nursing, but there weren’t very many jobs available. There was an overage of nurses, so I ended up working in a nursing home for about six months, and then I moved on to an acute care hospital, working on a telemetry unit."

She worked on the telemetry unit for about three years and then got married and moved out of state to Indiana. Once in Indiana, Foley worked in an ICU for another three years. After her work in the ICU, Foley started traveling as a nurse, going to Hawaii, San Francisco, Los Angels and Florida.

"For the next five or six years, I traveled all over," she said. "Traveling was really an enjoyable time. Florida was much too nice. I guess I kind of just followed the warm weather. I also really learned open-heart surgery well down in Florida."

During her traveling assignments, Foley worked at several Denver hospitals, but the place Foley ended up was at North Suburban. "I was planning on traveling for many more years, but I got here and really, really identified with where I was," she said of her time in Colorado. "So, I decided to stay here."

While she was working at the different hospitals in Denver, she was working as an ICU nurse, but eight years ago, she started working in the cath lab. "That’s where I’ve been ever since," she said.

"North Suburban was opening a new interventional cath lab, so I thought it would be a great opportunity to start a new program, and we’ve done a lot of good things."

The lab opened in June 2003, and Foley has been at North Suburban since February of 2003.

One of the reasons she has decided to make North Suburban her home is because of the company and administration, she said. "There’s something to be said for people who are loyal, but a lot of times I think big corporations make it difficult to be loyal to them," she said. "I really believe that – sometimes they lose perspective of the focus, which is patients."

Many of her lessons she learned from working at several hospitals while traveling. "If (the hospital administration isn’t) doing everything they can to help the patients, then I don’t want to work with them.

"I think the management here – all the way to the top – makes it a priority to have interaction with people on all levels. Everyone here knows who the CNO is and CEO – you pretty much know them on a first-name basis, which is a very different approach from what I’ve seen in the past.

"HealthONE is very supportive of its staff and there is a huge amount of resources available to us as well. There are just a lot of things here I think they do well."

One of the biggest challenges in her career, Foley said, was helping start the cath lab where she works now. "It was a lot of work," she said. "But being a nurse in the cath lab is probably one of the most immediately rewarding positions I’ve had in my career because we’re on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week – every other week. And, when you come in to do an emergency case, someone is literally having a heart attack and trying to die.

"For the most part, we’re successful and we get to see positive, immediate results – the patient is no longer having a heart attack and they stabilize. I think it’s a very, very rewarding thing."

Foley’s future plans are to grow the program at North Suburban. "I think we’re in a wonderful area of opportunity here, and there are a lot of cardiovascular patients in this area. We’re showing the public that we have a quality program, and our numbers have steadily grown since we opened."