December 26, 2008

Saint Thomas mission chief moves on to fill new role

Andy Telli. Tennessee Register

Sister Mary Kay Tyrell, D.C., is leaving her post as the senior vice president of mission and ministry for Saint Thomas Health Services to begin her work as a Provincial Councillor for the Daughters of Charity East Central Region, headquartered in Evansville, Ind.

“I’m very sad about leaving here. I love Nashville,” said Sister Mary Kay, but she is looking forward to the “opportunity to serve my sisters in another way.”

She will be assisting the order’s Provincial Superior as one of four councillors. While her responsibilities haven’t yet been fully defined, Sister Mary Kay said, one issue she will be helping with is the planned merger of four of the five provinces of the Daughters of Charity in the United States over the next three years. With close to 900 Daughters scattered from the Southwest to the East Coast, she said, “that’s a lot to do.”

Finding her vocation

Her life with the Daughters of Charity has combined her lifelong interest in health care and her religious vocation. Before she joined the order, Sister Mary Kay was working in the business office of a Daughters of Charity owned hospital in her hometown of Chicago while studying to become a nurse.

“I loved every one of them. They were wonderful role models for serving the poor, wonderful, joyful sisters,” Sister Mary Kay said. “They had a sense I had a religious vocation. I didn’t think I would be good enough to join them.”

She accepted the sisters’ invitation to join the order in 1965. After receiving her nursing degree in 1969, she worked as a staff nurse at Daughters of Charity hospitals in Michigan and Indiana. The order then sent her to school to earn her master’s degree in nursing and certification as a midwife. She delivered 2,000 babies in 10 years at St. Margaret’s Hospital in Montgomery, Ala.

After working several years in administrative posts for her Province, Sister Mary Kay returned to health care in the early 1990s as a vice president of mission at St. Joseph’s Health Services in Chicago. She took a similar position at Saint Thomas in Nashville in 2003.

History of service

The Daughters of Charity order was founded by St. Vincent de Paul and St. Louise de Marillac in 1633 and one of its first ministries was to provide health care to the poor. That ministry has been a constant for the Daughters of Charity as they opened hospitals across the globe, including Saint Thomas in Nashville more than 110 years ago. The health systems in four provinces of the Daughters of Charity eventually were merged with other Catholic health care systems into Ascension Health, the largest not-for-profit health care system in the country.

The Daughters of Charity’s involvement in modern health care has the same motivation as its founding more than 300 years ago, Sister Mary Kay said. “Our only reason for doing that is to promote access to the poor and vulnerable. … That’s our whole charism. It’s all about the vulnerable and fragile in society.”

Part of her job at Saint Thomas has been to make sure the four-hospital system remains true to the Daughters’ mission. As health care in the United States has changed over the years, the hospitals operated by the Daughters of Charity have had “to be more creative in helping people falling through the cracks,” Sister Mary Kay said.

One way they’ve done that, she said, is through the health clinics that serve the working poor and charge patients on a sliding scale based on their ability to pay, she said. Each of the four hospitals in the system, Saint Thomas and Baptist in Nashville, Middle Tennessee Medical Center in Murfreesboro, and Hickman Community Hospital in Centerville, is associated with such clinics, Sister Mary Kay said.

Saint Thomas Health Services also started the Dispensary of Hope, which collects medication samples from physicians’ offices and distributes them to the needy through the clinics.

“I don’t think anybody really wants a hand out. They want a hand up,” Sister Mary Kay said. “But there are people who just don’t know how to do that. They’re just so needy.”

Honor and identity

Another focus of her work has been passing on the charism and ministry of the Daughters of Charity to the lay people working in all their ministries, Sister May Kay said.

“With fewer sisters, we know we’re going to have to make changes in our ministries,” Sister Mary Kay said. “We don’t have the sisters to staff them.”

Part of that effort involves reinforcing the Catholic identity of the four hospitals in the Saint Thomas system. “Ascension Health has been very proactive in producing resource material to promote our Catholic identity” by looking at issues such as reverence for the patients, prayer, Catholic social teaching, and the church’s ethical directives related to health care, Sister Mary Kay said.

“Reverence is so key,” Sister Mary Kay said. “It’s about how reverent we are toward people. When we treat people as another Christ, as another holy person, that is our Catholic identity.”

Maintaining a Catholic identity is particularly important for a place like Saint Thomas where Catholics make up a minority of the general population as well as the staff, Sister Mary Kay said.

“We hire for fit,” looking for people comfortable in a faith-based atmosphere. You have to be someone who honors other people,” Sister Mary Kay said. “Personal values and institutional values merge into something better.”

A replacement for Sister Mary Kay has not yet been named, but she said it will not be another Daughter of Charity. She will be installed in her new position on Jan. 4, the Feast Day of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, the first American-born saint and the founder of the Sisters of Charity.