| Community Report |
The Garden Room
Susan Weatherly, Artist
This community wide effort of transforming the Oncology Room into the Garden Room has been extremely healing for both volunteers and the patients. Inspired by two PeaceHealth Siuslaw Region employees who are cancer survivors and had spent many hours undergoing chemotherapy treatments, they were brutally struck with the importance of environment when facing a life threatening illness. This sterile room brought a chill to their bones and their spirits. Cancer patients had been coming into this room weekly and would spend hours in a place that treated their cancer with medicine, but missed nurturing the spirit of the person with the disease. The two of them knew something had to be done. Out of this difficult time was born a volunteer heart-mission to change this room into one reflecting the Healing and Compassionate Care Mission of healthcare here at PHSR.
Volunteers: Ed and Sal
The Garden Room now offers an environment of healing and peace as patients sit, sometimes for many hours to receive their live saving treatments. Some of the new additions to the room are a blanket warmer, refrigerator, DVD players to watch movies, CD players to listen to music, a wall mounted water feature that brings soothing sounds and a window garden area that brings the outside into the once clinical environment.
Special donations that made this project possible were from PeaceHealth Siuslaw Auxiliary, the Garden Club of Florence, the Ladies of the Elks, the Exalted Rulers of the Elks and Bones Nursery.
This project is just one of many that brings the community together with PeaceHealth in a joint effort to bring healing and compassionate care to both the organization and the community PeaceHealth serves.