Karla Fogel poses with Endeavor Health President and CEO J.P. Gallagher at a recent event honoring team members celebrating 20 years or more of service.
From white caps to modern nursing
Fogel was inspired to enter nursing by her mother, who spoke of the heroic nurses who served during World War II.
“She had such respect for them. She said they really make wonderful mothers and they help everybody,” Fogel said. “I think that inspired me to want to be one of those people who would rise above, to really know what to do to help other people. I knew mom would encourage me in that.”
Over the course of her career, Fogel earned a master’s degree in nursing education and a Ph.D. in nursing and healthcare ethics. Her academic interest focused on healthcare ethics, and she researched moral distress in critical care nurses. She serves on the Hospital Ethics Committee for Endeavor Health and the Endeavor System Ethics/Bioethic Counsel, has participated in patient clinical ethics consultations, and precepts the clinical ethicist fellowship program. She was a professor in the school of nursing at North Park University in Chicago for 34 years.
And to this day, she will still hear people remark, “She’s just a nurse,” she said.
Fogel recalled a memory early in her career when she was the scrub nurse for a surgeon in the operating room. She needed a piece of equipment that was closer to the doctor and asked him using his first name to hand it to her.
“He said, ‘It’s doctor!’ And I said, ‘Then it’s Mrs. Fogel!’” she said. “For decades he called me Mrs. Fogel. I ran into him years later at a book signing during an ethics grand rounds after he had retired. I was standing in line to get my copy signed and I heard, ‘Karla Fogel!’ and I turned around and said, ‘It’s Doctor Fogel.’”
That’s one way the nursing profession has changed for the better over the years, she said: The level of professionalism nurses achieve and the respect they receive.
The personal side of healthcare
Fogel’s experience with nursing came full circle, as both she and her husband found themselves on the receiving end of capable nursing care at Evanston Hospital.
In fact, everyone in her immediate family has received care from an Endeavor Health hospital. Fogel was born at Endeavor Health Elmhurst Hospital, her husband, Stephen, was born at Endeavor Health Swedish Hospital, all 3 of their sons were born at Endeavor Health Evanston Hospital, their parents were cared for at both Evanston Hospital and Endeavor Health Glenbrook Hospital and 6 of their 9 grandchildren were born at either Evanston Hospital or Elmhurst Hospital.
Stephen passed away in 2017 after a one year battle with cancer.
We intentionally made decisions to stay with Endeavor Health and got all of his care there, she said.
“It was a beautiful story even with a very sad ending. I got such wonderful support,” she said.
When Fogel had her third child at Evanston Hospital, she was working as the night supervisor at the time and her water broke in the morning, during the day shift.
“The night shift was mad. They said, ‘You’re supposed to come in during our shift!’” Fogel said. “But one nurse on the day shift used to work nights and asked a coworker if she could take care of me. Coworkers are everything to me. It’s not the what you do in a job, it’s the who you’re working with that makes it wonderful.”
“I never left the bedside”
Fogel is proud of the work she and her nursing team have done over the last 50 years.
“When I started at Evanston Hospital in 1975, I heard we were pioneers in primary nursing caring for the whole patient: physically, emotionally and socially,” she said. “We were one of the original Magnet Hospitals studied to see why they attracted and held onto the nursing staff. I hope we will keep our identity as this quality, Magnet nursing hospital.
“I’m most proud of the people who have always stepped up for all the many types of crises over all these years. They ran toward the problem, not away,” she said.
As for her personal accomplishments, Fogel said she’s most proud of the fact that, now in her role as a clinical ethics educator, she makes direct patient and family care a priority.
“I never left the bedside,” she said.
