St. Anthony Hospital is the crowning point of midtown renaissance
Walk through the modern hallways of St. Anthony Hospital in midtown Oklahoma City and you will meet nurses who have worked there for more than 30 years, said Stephanie Collier, a registered nurse in the ICU. She has been with the midtown Oklahoma City hospital for nine years.
Collier is impressed with the hospital’s employee satisfaction, which is one reason she has worked there for nearly a decade.
“Most of the managers who work here have been in our position, not asking us to do anything they haven’t done themselves,” said Collier, a charge nurse.
The hospital receives patients from all walks of life and treats them with respect and unconditional love no matter their situation.
“If you’re going to stay here, your mentality as a nurse has to be to help people who can’t help themselves,” she said.
The history of St. Anthony Hospital is a vibrant legacy of outreach, including helping people through the Great Depression with the soup lines.
“We helped with the Oklahoma City bombing,” Collier said.
St. Anthony remains a helping hand to the community as a beacon of hope through the years.
“In order to work here I think you have to be a certain kind of personality,” she said. “And you find the people who stay here are those kind of people. And everybody around just wants to help people.”
Collier began her nursing career at St. Anthony as a licensed practical nurse. She had been an ICU nurse in the military. Collier said the practice of St. Anthony has been to hire RNs and not LPNs for the ICU. But her boss made an exception and took a chance with Collier.
“Since then she has helped me grow into a leadership role,” Collier said. “So as a nurse I have grown exponentially in this ICU with her working with me and her taking a chance with me.”
She has since received credentials in heart recovery and dialysis. She is trained to respond rapidly to an event before a Code Blue happens.
Collier gets to know a lot of people who work at St. Anthony by seeing them every day and often times collaborating with them.
One such person is ER nurse Allie Webb, RN, who has been with St. Anthony for eight years.
“She can call and say, ‘Hey, we need help.’ Or I can call down there and say, ‘Do you have this piece of equipment?’” Collier said.
St. Anthony is a hospital that values the meaning of being a nurse, Webb said.
“You can’t build a house without a foundation and I think they really understand that,” Webb said. “I think it speaks to all the healthplexes we have opened. I don’t think you do unless you are successful, and part of our success, I think, is due to all the great people we have working at St. Anthony.”
St. Anthony Hospital is excited about its new four-story St. Anthony Hospital Pavilion. When it opens in late May or early June of this year, the 110,000-square-foot facility will grace Oklahoma as the hospital’s latest expansion on the Oklahoma City hospital’s midtown campus.
It consists of a new emergency room to replace the existing ER. There are two new intensive care units and an intermediate care unit.
The Pavilion represents the crowning point of the 2014 plan. In 2003, Saints made the decision to stay in midtown by investing $220 million to improving and modernizing its campus. The results have been spectacular, adding to the renaissance of downtown Oklahoma City with development and growth.
“Knowing that I have the power and knowledge to help people,” is what continues to motivate Webb’s nursing career each day. “I love my coworkers. They are like family. And if you love the people you work with, you can do anything.”
