By Jill Nagy
If someone needs a nurse, Lisa Murphy can be there without the patient leaving home. Her Glens Falls-based ADK Mobile Nurse Services provides services in patients’ homes—or wherever else they are—in communities within 60 miles of Glens Falls, including Queensbury, Lake George, Saratoga, Albany, and surrounding locations.
Murphy is a registered nurse with 15 years of hospital experience, including case management, and 10 years as a director of clinical services in long term care and rehabilitation facilities. Her office, at 35 Evergreen Lane, Queensbury, is in a senior living facility.
With hospitals discharging patients earlier and providing less outpatient care, there is a growing need for the kind of care Murphy can provide. She can step in to provide follow-up care after hospital discharge, whether managing medications, changing dressings, helping patients adjust to a new lifestyle, or just looking in to be sure someone is getting along well.
In addition, she administers intravenous vitamin and mineral treatments (on orders from a physician).
Care ranges from a single consultation to continuing care on a monthly retainer basis.
Murphy estimates that she has seen about 100 clients so far. She has been busy enough to cut back on a formerly full-time nursing job. She offers a wide range or services.
“I do what I can within the scope of my practice,” she said. She cannot write prescriptions but she can help patients understand their medications.
When Murphy is unable to provide a service herself, she can often refer a client to someone who can. For example, when someone needed a physical therapist who makes house calls, she was able to find one for the patient. In the future, she said, “I would like to get an arsenal of other professionals” who will provide home services.
Murphy is also a certified Alzheimers educator. She can help arrange a home so that it is safe for someone with dementia. She can also help the patient and family members know what to expect in the future.
She prides herself on giving one-on-one care and taking as much time as it needs.
“I absolutely love it,” she said of her practice and notes that it is far better than trying to divide her time among 40 patients.
In a few weeks, Murphy expects to receive a Masters degree in health care management. She is putting the finishing touches on a thesis entitled Lateral Violence in Health Care, exploring what she sees as a “huge problem worldwide,” not so much physical violence as bullying and harassment. She sees experienced nurses lording it over less experienced colleagues.
The problem seems to be worst in emergency room settings and got significantly worse during the COVID crisis, she said. Nurses are frightened or unsure of themselves and take it out on their colleagues. And there are just not enough nurses to go around. Murphy cited the figure that there will be a shortage of one million nurses in 10 years.
Murphy’s thesis is based on research she did at New England College in New Hampshire, where she also did the clinical rotations that were part of a mostly online program through Aspen University in Colorado.
“I don’t ever want to go to school again,” but predicts that she will change her mind and begin working toward certification as a nurse practitioner. That will allow her to prescribe medications and, equally important, to bill insurance companies for her services.
The service’s webpage is ADKMobileNurseServices.com and the telephone number is 518-925-7013.