Bucks nurse to receive national award

This article was published in The Philadelphia Inquirer on July 24th, 2009.

Bucks nurse to receive national award

By Naomi Nix

Inquirer Staff Writer
When residents in Bucks County need to know about health care, they can turn to Theresa Conejo.

"I call myself a health navigator," Conejo, 49, of Bensalem, says of her work for the last six years with community-service organizations, many of which assist minorities.

For her efforts, she will receive the Henrietta Villaescusa Award for community service today in San Antonio. It is given every year by the National Association of Hispanic Nurses at its annual conference. She was nominated by one of the nurses at Nazareth Hospital in Northeast Philadelphia.

Henrietta Villaescusa, who died in 2005, was a pioneering nurse in Los Angeles who helped implement health-care programs for underserved communities around the world.

Outside of her 36-hour job as a float nurse at Nazareth, Conejo says, she devotes about four hours of her free time each week to organizing awareness events about health issues including AIDS, diabetes, breast cancer, and strokes.

She rounds up some of her friends in the medical field and travels to flea markets, parades, and cultural events in Bucks County and Philadelphia, giving medical exams and distributing health information. She works with a spectrum of nonprofit organizations, from the American Heart Association to a Hindu temple in Bucks County.

Other community organizers praise her dedication.

"She is one of the most down-to-earth people I have ever met. Her advocacy comes from a true passion of wanting to help," says Kateria Nunez, the executive director of the Latino Leadership Alliance, where Conejo serves as board president.

Theda Jordan, a fellow member of the Bucks County chapter of the NAACP, agreed. Conejo, who serves as health director for the Bucks chapter, is "willing to go above and beyond to assist anyone," she says.

In her office at Nazareth, sifting through papers with research about the racial disparities found with some of the most serious diseases - African Americans are more likely to develop diabetes, Latinos and African Americans have higher rates of AIDS - she tells of a woman she knew.

Tomasa Gonzales emigrated from Mexico and lived in Bensalem with her husband and two young children. She took an English class at the YMCA in Bensalem, where Conejo volunteered as a translator.

Last year, Gonzales, 30 and five months pregnant with her third child, began to feel the symptoms of a stroke - dizziness, weakness, vision troubles, and difficulty speaking, Conejo recalls. Gonzales' husband took her to a free health-care clinic twice, but because neither was fluent in English, their medical emergency was not properly addressed, Conejo says.

Tomasa Gonzales died after suffering a stroke while dropping off her children at a Head Start program.

Motivated by Gonzales' story, Conejo organized a bilingual memorial event called Salud es Vida (Health is Life), which honored the memory of Gonzales, and at which Latino medical professionals taught 60 Latina women in Bensalem about the risk of stroke.

For Conejo, Gonzales' experience with the health-care system is nothing like the one she had as a child.

When growing up in Bensalem, her father was a steam feeder and her mother was a homemaker. Conejo, who is Mexican American, graduated from Bensalem High School and later Frankford Hospital School of Nursing.

Her family always had health insurance and good medical care, she says, and never had any difficulty communicating medical needs.

"It wasn't until after I became a nurse that I started hearing people's hardships, and I realized what people had to go through for health care," says Conejo, who is married and has a 20-year-old son.

Conejo emphasizes that good health care means that medical professionals should be conscious and sensitive to a patient's culture and background.

She says she is at times frustrated when she observes medical professionals who are not attentive or even are hostile when a patient is not fluent in English or has different cultural practices.

Conejo recalls a stroke victim, an Indian man who did not speak English. He was crying and holding his arm while the attending nurse was "kind of gruff with him," Conejo says.

Conejo had learned about his culture through her volunteer work at the Hindu temple, where she assisted with health fairs.

"They drink a lot of chai tea, and that's very comforting to them," she says. She did not know the stroke patient, but she made him a cup of tea. When she later went to the Bucks temple, she was surprised by the impact of the cup of tea.

"One of the key leaders, he came up to me and said, 'I would like to thank you for taking care of my father. You gave him tea that made so much of a difference to him.' " It is her hope that more health-care professionals will give that level of attention.

"Just that simple gesture of giving him tea made his day. Did it take his pain away? No. It made him feel that someone respected him," she says.