Every Patient 'a VIP'

Operation Access, a free surgery clinic for the uninsured and underinsured, is honoring nurse Amrit Mann for eight years and hundreds of hours of service.

The nonprofit organization holds the clinics quarterly at Kaiser Permanente Redwood City Medical Center, where Mann is on staff, and at 12 other sites throughout the Bay Area. Hospitals donate the space, and the clinics are staffed entirely by volunteers – nurses, surgeons and anesthesiologists.

Mann puts in a full work week, but has valued working a sixth day at the clinic: While the surgeries are relatively minor, they are life-changing for those who receive them.

There was the former athlete who had been stilled by a painful shoulder injury.

There was the woman in her 80s whose eye obstruction had robbed her of her life’s passion – literature. She was so thrilled to have her vision restored she held up a book and read through her gauze bandage while she was still in the recovery room.

“Everybody here is a VIP,” Mann said of the patients, who are screened and referred by community health centers. They receive the same quality of care as insured patients in the hospital, she said.

Mann admits patients, preps them for surgery, then cares for them in recovery in a continuous rotation. She also oversees staffing, supplies and medications.

“Amrit is all over the place,” said Operation Access program manager Ali Balick, who nominated her for the award. “She is the first to arrive and the last to leave. I depend on her. She can look at the caseload and say, ‘We can do it.’”

Surgeon John Ngai has worked with Mann for all eight years.

"She's one of the backbones here," he said.

Saturday, as we watched, Mann cared for six patients, including two having eye surgery. As Juana Flores awoke from anesthesia with an eye bandage and a wave of nausea, Luisa Martinez waited to have a cyst removed after 10 years.

That’s common for Operation Access patients, Mann said.

“They think they can’t afford it, so they put it off,” she said. And most cannot afford to take time off work afterwards, which complicates recovery.

Mann arrived from India in 1976. Nursing is her second career; previously, she worked as an administrative assistant for the city. She tapped her gynecologist and her children’s pediatrician for advice about the field before enrolling in nursing school in 1991.

She started her career at the Mayo Clinic and came to the Kaiser facility in Redwood City in 1998. With her daughter now in pre-med and her son in film school, she is free to travel.

“I thought of joining Doctors without Borders, but I don't need to," she said. "We do that right here."