Nurse Has a Colorful Career in White as Hospital’s Head Visionary

To anyone else, the sign on the vacant lot--”Coming Soon--Community Hospital of San Gabriel”--may have looked like just another sign on a vacant lot. But Ann Chiesa saw beyond the sign a greater vision.

She saw excitement, adventure and a chance to establish the highest level of professionalism for nursing. So she wrote down the address on the sign and sent in her resume. That was in 1957, when she was working as medical supervisor at Methodist Hospital in Arcadia, and she heard nothing for almost three years.

In 1960 the San Gabriel hospital finally got off the drawing board and Chiesa got on the payroll as director of nursing. It was a one-person payroll for what was still a vacant lot, but the vision had become a lot more.

By the time the 142-bed hospital was completed that year, Chiesa’s imprint was all over--in the placement of equipment and furniture, in the personnel, in the standards for patient care, and even in the clothes nurses would wear.

Chiesa is now assistant administrator for nursing, and celebrating her 25th anniversary as resident visionary. Hundreds of well-wishers turned out recently for an anniversary tribute at which she received 15 special awards and commendations, adding to an already sizable collection she has accumulated during her long career.

A hospital spokesman said that in a quarter of a century Chiesa has “paved the way, set the tone and established the policy for what nursing is for hundreds of nurses who look to her for rules and a role model.” She is known as a taskmaster and outspoken supervisor, and at the same time a “mother hen with all her little chicks.”

“I feel like it’s mine,” Chiesa said of the hospital. “Investing 25 years of your life in anything makes you feel kind of possessive.”

Chiesa, 65, and trained in a Catholic hospital where, she said, “they are organized, so you have to be organized.” She earned a bachelor’s degree in nursing at New York University.

She was director of nurses for Mt. Sinai Hospital in Hartford, Conn., when she was 30, and became medical supervisor of Methodist Hospital in Arcadia when she moved to the San Gabriel Valley with her husband, Albert Porto, in 1952.

Nursing has changed greatly during Chiesa’s career, with the advent of new technologies and medications, the elimination of many hospital training programs and shifting social standards. Nurses no longer routinely wear crisp white dresses, and caps began disappearing more than a decade ago.

But as long as Chiesa has her way, some things will never change. One of them is uniforms.

“We wear dresses and white caps,” she stated firmly. “Nurses’ registries know our dress code and they won’t send anyone who won’t comply with it.

“More than 70% of our patients are older people and they identify with that image of a nurse. These people are frightened, they want to know that someone who knows what to do is taking care of them, and (a nurse) who is wearing street clothes doesn’t lend much security. And besides, where there’s casualness there’s a tendency to be lax.”

During the San Gabriel hospital’s lifetime the medical field has seen the introduction of coronary care units and intensive care units, a major decline in maternity units, and “paper work that is unreal,” Chiesa said. There are now 750 on the payroll.

The hospital has worked to meet the challenge, its adaptations and age are showing. It is undergoing a major renovation and construction project that includes a new five-story patient care building for a total of 215 beds.

“My next dream is to see that building go up,” Chiesa said. “When you’ve worked on something so long you want to see it grow, see something new out there. Then I will have done my thing.”