McCready's 'Patient advocate'

Meet Lori Ward – McCready Memorial Hospital’s Patient Care Coordinator.

As “the patients’ advocate,” Lori helps them with the transition from McCready hospital to whatever comes next – getting back home, into a nursing home or into a rehabilitation facility. Or, it could be connecting with a home health service, a hospice or other community health services. She’s also the liaison between patients and health insurance carriers.

“At the end of the day,” Lori says, “I might be tired, but I’m also feeling pretty good if I’ve made something easier for a patient or a family during a frightening, difficult time.”

She epitomizes what McCready is all about. A fourth-generation healthcare worker at the Crisfield hospital, Lori got her start as an activities’ department volunteer at the Alice B. Tawes Nursing Home, where her paternal grandmother was living at the time.

Lori's great-grandmother was the Tawes nursing home’s business office manager when it opened in 1968. That same year, Lori’s mother, Tara, found summer work at the nursing home as a diet clerk delivering meals and working in the kitchen before heading off to college.

Lori Ward with her mom, Tara, right

Lori considered a career in education, but realized after working as a nursing home volunteer that the healthcare field and the population McCready serves – especially the elderly – appealed to her. She had found her calling as a social worker.

A Crisfield native, Lori graduated from the local high school in 1992 and went on to enroll in Salisbury University. She earned her bachelor’s in 1996 and was in SU's first graduate class (2003) awarded master’s degrees in social work under the supervision of department chairman Marvin Tossey. She serves on her alma mater’s alumni board, a way of staying connected with school and classmates that energizes her.

Lori enjoys listening to a wide variety of music – she politely avoids expressing a favorite genre – and is known for traveling to attend concerts. Boating on the bay with her parents is favorite pastime, too. “I’d like to learn to fish,” she says and is looking forward to her father giving her some pointers during the upcoming boating season.

Scrapbooking is another passion. Friends and family frequently are recipients of these personalized stories. If she did one about herself, Mickey Mouse and her pet rabbit Oreo, a French lop, would certainly play prominent roles.

Tara Ward, now a teacher, has keepsake photos of Lori at 18 months holding her first stuffed Mickey, the beginning of a life-long fondness for America’s iconic cartoon mouse. Mickey-memorabilia – and an occasional Minnie – populate Lori’s home and she has an eclectic assortment of Mickey Mouse knickknacks around her work station. She’s visited Walt Disney World in Florida seven times since age four and now in her thirties, California dreams to some day visit Disneyland.

Day trips to Washington, D.C. touring museums and monuments are another way Lori likes to relax.

She has been a member of the First Baptist Church in Crisfield since her mid-teens.

The grateful patients at McCready she helps today are also her neighbors, relatives and family friends. Many have familiar surnames: Sterling and Tyler, Byrd and Bozman, Dize and Tawes – and  of course, Ward.

                                                                  Portrait and scrapbooking photos by Patty Hancock