It was 60 years ago, but Dorola Haley, RN, remembers quite clearly when the first baby was born at the Kaiser Permanente Sacramento Medical Center.
“Everybody made a big fuss over it. We brought the new mother flowers,” she recalled of that day in 1965. “It was very exciting,”
Haley, 83, an ob-gyn nurse, recently recalled highlights of her career at Kaiser Permanente as the hospital celebrates its 60th anniversary this month.
Haley, who also is a nurse practitioner, had come to work at the new hospital just a week before the May 3, 1965 delivery. Al Kahane, MD, the hospital’s first chief of the Ob-Gyn Department, who later became the medical center’s second physician-in-chief, delivered the baby.
At the time, Haley was a recent nurse graduate and a newlywed when she and her husband moved from the Bay Area to a home near the Sacramento Medical Center in early 1965. As she settled in, a neighbor told her Kaiser Permanente was hiring. She walked into the medical center to ask for a job, making her one of the original employees of Kaiser Permanente’s flagship hospital in Sacramento.
The organization had just purchased the Arden Community Hospital and entered the Sacramento market. With just 13 physicians serving 12,000 members, the hospital was a small place where everyone knew each other. And though a new medical provider in town, it soon became known for its unique delivery model and patient-centered care, Haley recalled.
At one point, the ob-gyn clinic was in a small house next to the hospital, which was surrounded by empty fields.
“I would come over to the hospital and give new mothers their postpartum appointment and tell them that if they had any problems to call us. It was the continuity of care and taking care of all the patients’ needs, not having it fragmented,” she said. “We provided top-notch care and our whole goal was to provide continuous care. People were amazed that they could get everything done here. We were the trendsetter for Sacramento.”
She recalled how Dr. Kahane allowed fathers in the delivery room, a practice he learned in the military that was largely unheard of at that time.
“They would be in scrubs with their wife or partner, seeing the baby born. Some staff were sure the dads would be on the floor, freaking out,” Haley said. “But it didn’t happen, and maybe it was good for them to see what their wives experienced.”
Haley became a nurse practitioner and saw many medical advances benefitting patients through her three decades of nursing, including the development of genetic testing and infertility services.
“The technology makes it easier to get the knowledge you need, and that is a good thing,” she said. “But the evolution of health care doesn’t change the fact that at the heart of it are people needing care and the people providing the care.”
She transitioned after 30 years of working at the medical center to working for the Division of Research on a breast cancer study. After that job, she retired again.
Haley is not the retiring type, though. She is back serving patients at the medical center as a trainee in the Clinical Pastoral Education program to become a professional chaplain. Trainees are required to complete 1,600 patient hours, which translates into seeing dozens of patients per week.
Haley is again becoming a familiar sight around the medical center as she travels the hallways on her scooter to see patients. “I absolutely love it,” she said. “It’s all about the people.”
