Q&A with Samaritan Regional CEO Gwen Maloney

In her 38 years as a nurse, there's not much Gwen Maloney hasn't seen.

She's watched a deaf woman hear for the first time in the mountains of Jamaica. She's witnessed a 16-year-old survive a terminal brain tumor and relearn his ABCs. Yet, Maloney's career has most notably been marked but what she hasn't seen -- affordable health care.

Maloney is the CEO of Samaritan Regional Health Clinic in Cape Girardeau, the only free medical clinic in Southeast Missouri.

Samaritan operates entirely off donations and small grants. All its employees, from nurses to physicians, are volunteers. Patients only pay for care if they wish to leave a donation.

Before Samaritan, Maloney worked in neurology at Southeast Hospital. She began her career at St. Francis Hospital as a licensed practical nurse (LPN), and worked in both St. Francis and Southeast's intensive care units (ICU). Her credentials include RN, BSN, and certified neurological RN.

Southeast Missourian sat down with Maloney last week to discuss her decades-long dedication to healthcare. The following conversation has been edited for clarity.

SM: Let's start at the beginning. Why did you become a nurse?

Maloney: I guess it goes all the way back to when I was in my 20s when my father had a massive heart attack at home. Then, as a result of that he had brain damage. He was in the ICU for six weeks and coded over 16 times. He was in his 50s, and we wanted to take him home even though the doctors told us we shouldn't. We found out that there were so many things we didn't know. Long story short, Dad was a diabetic and we couldn't get his insulin from the hospital. As a result of that, his blood sugar got real low and he coded and he didn't make it. I think that's what made me decide I needed to know more about things like this. So, I went to school and became a nurse. I think I was 32 at the time.

SM: What were you doing before then?

Maloney: I was a beautician.

SM:That's quite the career change.

Maloney: It's really not as strange as you think. Beauticians study a lot of anatomy, well, anatomy of the head, but it's still anatomy.

SM: Your career seems to be mostly centered on helping those who are medically underserved. The Samaritan Clinic is free. You were president of the Jamaican Christian Medical Mission before it closed three years ago. Why gravitate towards free health care?

Maloney: Working in the ICU, we would see people on death's doorstep over and over again. When you see that all the time you're like, 'Why was there not anybody out there to help these people.' Most of the time, people with the least amount of care were low income. There was a lady that came into Southeast's ICU with an inoperable brain tumor. She was a fairly young lady, I can't remember how old, but she had eight children. Her smallest child was 8. It [her problems] all started because she had a tumor on one of her breasts. The tumor was removed, but it metastasized to her brain. She worked at an ice cream company down South. It was the type of job where if she wasn't there to do it, somebody else would step in and do it, and she would lose her job. Then how would she feed her eight children? Sometimes, doctors will not follow up with patients because no one is there to tell them to. They told her they 'thought' they got all the tumor, but she fell through the cracks. She never got a follow-up. Some time later, she came in with an inoperable brain tumor and died. I wondered what happened to those eight kids she had. I saw things like that happen over and over. You think, man, if there was just someone there to explain to them how important it is to get a follow-up despite the expense. I think that's why I decided to do it [open Samaritan], because over and over I would see similar things happen.

SM: Especially in the United States where medical care can be incredibly expensive if you don't have a job that offers good insurance.

Maloney: Yes. In the state of Missouri, Medicaid is very difficult to get, especially for a man. If you're a young man, you can almost not get it. They just kind of get passed over because the state figures they can work. Like one gentleman we have now. He's a chronic renal failure patient. He's got a couple more steps until he's on dialysis. Once you're on dialysis, you can get social security and Medicaid, but until you get there, you won't get medicaid. At that point, though, you can't hold down a job either because you just don't feel well. We help those people as much as we can, the kind that fall through the cracks.

SM: Why do it? Why run a free clinic when you could easily make a cushy living with all your qualifications?

Maloney: There is one thing you learn as a nurse. Everyone comes into this world, and everyone dies. In between those milestones, we realize if we can leave this world a better place, then we have succeeded. Doing something for someone who isn't able to pay you offers a bigger reward than money.