PBN Health Care Heroes 2024
Nurse: MARIA CHIONCHIO
Children’s Friend & Service nurse family partnership manager
What led you to choose health care as your profession? I think I was 14 years old, when my dad would bring me to the old Lying-In Hospital (now Women & Infants Hospital) on Saturdays to be a candy striper, making beds. I loved the environment of helping patients and knew this is what I would do someday.
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How have you helped boost the quality of or access to health care? Since the start of the nurse family partnership, I have had the opportunity to educate women to become advocates for themselves in the health care system. In our partnerships with the community health centers and [Lifespan Corp.’s] Samuels Sinclair Dental Center, young women today are receiving the much-needed health services they need for themselves and their children.
What is the biggest challenge you and your organization are facing this year? The biggest challenge for our agency is inadequate funding for home-visiting services, such as the First Connections Program and early intervention, to families that need it the most. Also hiring and retaining staff in all programs continues to be a challenge.
What more do you feel the state can do to help further support the health care sector in Rhode Island? The state needs to look at additional funding sources for all home-visiting programs. Child care reimbursement for health care workers, some who work as [certified nursing assistants], and health aides with lower salaries face a high cost of child care, leading to many of the shortages we see in nursing homes and hospitals.
Tell us one thing that most people don’t know about you. I love New England weather, especially summer relaxing at the ocean with my grandchildren.
