Note: This story, originally published in fall 2021, is part of an occasional series highlighting key moments in St. Tammany Health System history. Read the health system's full history at www.sttammany.health/STHShistory.
By STHS Communication Department
Fall had only just descended on Covington in 1955 as Doris G. Alexander returned home from having a procedure done at the then-new St. Tammany Parish Hospital, and she felt an urge to say something.
“Do the people of the parish know how lucky we are to have the St. Tammany Parish Hospital?” she began a letter to the editor published in October of that year in the St. Tammany Farmer newspaper.
The hospital facilities, she wrote, were clean and beautiful. The doctors, she added, were “fine and congenial.” The nurses and their aides were, in her words, “pleasant at all times.”
But she saved arguably her most effusive praise for the members of the St. Tammany Hospital Guild, the all-volunteer organization founded just six months earlier as the St. Tammany Hospital Women’s Auxiliary to provide non-professional, non-administrative services to the hospital.
“These ladies are doing a fine job,” Alexander wrote. “Almost all day there is a lady on duty from this organization. At mid-morning they serve juices and coffee to the patients, which makes a pleasant break in the day. They also bring around toilet articles and incidentals that patients might have forgotten to bring from home. Books and magazines from the library are also offered to the patients, as another fine service.”
Fast forward more than six decades, and the approximately 135 men and women making up the guild’s ranks are still providing comfort, care and companionship to the hospital’s patients, as well as highly valued support for its staff.
“Oh, they do everything,” STHS Volunteer Coordinator Shirley Primes said. “They’re up in endoscopy, where they greet patients. They prepare files for nurses upstairs. I have one in ambulatory care, where they give patients gowns and tell them, ‘They’ll be with you shortly.’ They’re in the surgery waiting area, they’re at the front desk. They’re at the Parenting Center and St. Tammany Hospice. They’re everywhere – and we’re lucky to have them.”