Yolanda Price started at Balboa in March 1983. Denise Hwang started that November. Estelle Boucher arrived the following summer. Between them they have given Winterfield a hundred and twenty-eight years, and all three are still on the ward.

The average nurse changes employer four times in a career. Three people staying in one building for four decades is not a normal outcome, and it seemed worth asking why.

They did not plan it

None of the three set out to stay. Price expected two years and a move to Los Angeles. Hwang took the job because it was ten minutes from her mother's house and her mother was ill. Boucher applied to four hospitals and Balboa answered first.

"There was no decision," Price says. "There was never a day where I chose to stay. There were about forty years of days where I did not leave."

What changed

A great deal. Charting moved from paper to a terminal on a trolley to a tablet in a pocket. Average length of stay for a routine surgical patient went from eleven days to three. The building has been extended twice and reroofed once, badly, in 1997.

Hwang keeps a photograph from her first year: eight nurses at a station with a wall of paper charts behind them, and a single telephone with a cord long enough to reach the corridor. "We thought that phone was the height of it," she says. "You could take a call and still see the ward."

People ask what has changed in forty years. Almost everything. But a frightened person at two in the morning is the same person they were in 1983, and there is still only one thing that helps, and it is not the equipment.

Denise Hwang, RN

What has not

All three, asked separately, gave the same answer to what has kept them, and it was not the pay and it was not the building.

It was the other two.

"You can survive a very bad shift if there is someone in the break room at the end of it who understands exactly what just happened and does not need it explained," Boucher says. "I have had that for forty-one years. I do not know how you buy that somewhere else."

Three generations

Between them the three have cared for members of the same families across three generations. Price delivered post-operative care to a woman in 1991, to her daughter after a caesarean in 2014, and to that daughter's son after a tonsillectomy last spring.

"He asked me if I was the same nurse who looked after his grandmother," she says. "I said I was. He thought about it for a while and asked if I was tired."

At a glance

  • Yolanda Price, RN — joined March 1983, surgical ward.
  • Denise Hwang, RN — joined November 1983, surgical ward, now also precepting.
  • Estelle Boucher, RN — joined July 1984, nights, and has stayed on nights by choice.
  • 128 years of combined service, all of it at Balboa.
  • Winterfield's nurse residency program now pairs every new graduate with a preceptor of ten years or more.

The residency

All three now precept. Hwang has taken on 61 new graduates since 2009, and keeps a list.

The thing she tells them on their first day is not clinical. "I tell them that they will have a shift, probably in the first six months, where they go home and think they are not built for this. Everybody has it. It is not a sign. Come and find me the next day."

Forty-nine of her sixty-one are still nursing. Nine are still at Winterfield.