Barb Amsden is 83 years old and has worked as a licensed nursing assistant at Rutland Regional Medical Center in Vermont for nearly five decades. She started in 1978 at $3.15 an hour and now works in the emergency department, where restocking supplies is only part of the assignment. Coworkers say her real contribution is the way she calms patients and families, a role that earned her the nickname “work mom.”
Her empathy was forged inside the same hospital walls. Amsden survived mouth cancer and lost her husband, Bob, to cancer at the hospital. Her longtime coworker and friend Brenda Dunlap lost her husband there to COVID. Head nurse Sheena Fisher says she wishes she could clone Barb, a sentiment most workplaces would recognize in their own long-serving staff.
Amsden walks six to seven thousand steps a shift, keeping pace with colleagues decades younger. Her story raises a simple question: who is the longest-serving, most-beloved person at your job, and have you told them what they mean to you? Let us know in the comments or call in and share.
