Los Robles Volunteers Give From the Heart : Medicine: Good Samaritans enjoy the social whirl at hospital as they provide an extra dimension of care.

His hands gripping the stainless-steel rail of Shirley Huber’s hospital bed, George Bollinger leaned over and launched into his instructions.

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“They’ll send a lot of pills home with you,” he told Huber, who is recovering from emergency open-heart surgery conducted Friday at Los Robles Regional Medical Center in Thousand Oaks. “It hurts like the devil to sneeze.”

Bollinger, 72, is not a doctor. When pressed, he admits that he doesn’t even like hospitals. Nevertheless, the retired aerospace engineer, who underwent his own heart bypass at Los Robles in 1990, has given hundreds of hours of his time as a hospital volunteer.

He was not doing it to help the hospital, which recently honored him as humanitarian of the year. “I do it for the people who need to be volunteered at,” Bollinger said Tuesday.

Bollinger is one of 500 volunteers at Los Robles who do everything from sell candy in the gift shop to tote urine samples through the hospital corridors. All told, officials said, they probably save the for-profit hospital about $1.5 million annually in labor costs, contributing about 80,000 hours of service last year.

“They are a vital, extremely vital, part of the hospital,” said acting administrator Ken Underwood. “We’re very, very grateful.”

The volunteers are assigned various tasks depending on their skills and interests, said Eleanor Roche, one of three staff members who coordinate the volunteer program.

So Guy Moulder, 78, who worships at a church led by one of the hospital’s chaplains, was training Wednesday to become a chaplain’s assistant. Mary Cordiero was working in the gift shop with two other volunteers who retired from retail businesses.

And Lois Lemons, 82, of Newbury Park, a retired teacher who has logged 14,900 volunteer hours at Los Robles, was serving as “hostess,” greeting patients and giving directions as they walked in the front door.

For many volunteers, the hospital serves as a social center as much as a workplace.

“It’s a place to meet people,” said Cordiero. “We’re supposed to be dusting, but we’re catching up on the news of the day.”

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Roche said many of the volunteers have recently had spouses die and are looking for companionship. Others, she said, are high school or college students exploring careers in medicine or former patients who want to give something back.

All must apply to be volunteers, attend training and orientation programs, and buy a green shirt and white pants to wear on the job.

Seven of the volunteers, like Bollinger, have had open-heart surgery and participate in the hospital’s “Heart to Heart” program, reassuring heart patients with stories of their own experiences.

Stephanie Brogdon, a nurse who takes care of heart patients, said that while doctors and nurses try to be as helpful as possible, volunteers like Bollinger can provide another dimension of care.

“He can tell them on a one-to-one basis what he’s gone through,” Brogdon said.

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That’s just what he does.

“In two weeks time I was driving and I felt great about that,” Bollinger told Huber.

He also shared with her his trick for preventing those painful sneezes. “Put your finger above your upper lip and press with your thumb on your lower chin,” he said, demonstrating on his own face.

In addition to visiting patients’ rooms, Bollinger also routinely stops by the cardiac rehabilitation workout room. Amid the hum of treadmills and whoosh of stationary bicycles, he commiserates with patients trying to rebuild their strength after surgery. “I didn’t want to go because I thought I had to put leotards on and look at a Jane Fonda film,” he told one.

Bollinger performed other volunteer work for the hospital in addition to advising heart patients.

Using the woodworking shop in his home, he assembled two red wagons and added seats and seat-belts to them. The wagons are used to transport pediatric patients through the hospital.

On the day of the Northridge earthquake, Bollinger came to the hospital from his home nearby and offered to help. He ended up searching the hallways for red electrical outlets that provided backup energy. It was an important task for those patients arriving at the hospital with home-health equipment that was running out of power.

“We had one guy who came in and was almost on his last air and George found him a red plug right away,” Roche said.