After about 50 years of service, Ola Mae Taylor strolled through an arch of swords to a lobby filled with nurses applauding and cheering for her and nearly 30 others Wednesday during the Retired Nurse Celebration at River Region Medical Center.

“It’s wonderful,” said the 82-year-old Taylor. “I didn’t think I would live this long to see it.”

Hospital staff honored retired nurses from Mercy Hospital, which was founded around 1900 and became ParkView Regional Medical Center in 1990; Vicksburg Medical Center, which is now River Region Medical Center West Campus, and River Region, hospital marketing director Diane Gawronski said.

Taylor, a former trainee of Kuhn Memorial State Hospital, joined the profession in the 1960s when nurses were required to wear starched and ironed white uniforms with matching caps and shoes while providing more than half an hour of service to each patient at a time. Nowadays, they wear scrubs of varying colors and sneakers.

“We did everything when we were nurses. We emptied the bed pans. We bathed the patients. We fed the patients. We got up and we walked the patients,” said Taylor.

These days hospitals often don’t have enough nurses on staff to provide that level of personal care, she said.

“They really don’t have enough help on the floor to really get close to the patient and sit down and talk with them when you go in the rooms and check on them,” said Taylor, who also spent 15 years teaching scrub techniques.

While current registered nurse Melissa Breithaupt agreed, she managed to win the patients choice award.

For several weeks, patients and visitors nominated nurses and wrote short stories about care they received at the hospital.

Breithaupt’s patients remarked on her “outstanding care and personal attention” as well as “demonstration of patience.”

“I appreciate the people who wrote the comments. We don’t always get the positive,” said Breithaupt. “I know there are probably plenty of other nurses that deserve this award.”

Most of the nursing staff is once again wearing the white uniforms since the arrival of the new Chief Nursing Officer Linda Wymbs, who spearheaded the celebration.

“It was a way for us to give back to nurses that have given so much of themselves,” said Wymbs, adding some retirees continue to serve through the River Region auxiliary.

“When you’ve spent the majority of your life caring for people, it’s hard to let it go and leave a healing environment,” Gawronski said. “So, by volunteering here, they feel like they’re still involved with patients and their care.”

Ceremony keynote speaker Dr. Briggs Hopson, vice president of medical affairs, alluded to the history of nursing, sharing how the necessity began in the home with the tending to children and evolved to assisting doctors in the 1880s following Florence Nightingale’s work during the Crimean War.

“Florence Nightingale felt the urge to help others. She had a keen interest in mathematics and statistics, and she blended that with helping people,” said Hopson.

In 1854, she organized 38 nurses to care for soldiers and decreased their death toll during the Crimean War.

As one of the most widely known figures in the history of nursing, she opened in 1860 the Nightingale Training School for Nurses, the first formal training program for nurses.

Where nurses once remained close to the bedside, now with advancements in technology such as diagnostic imaging and informatics, nurses are seeking higher levels of education, allowing them to enter more specialized fields.

Assistant Chief Nursing Officer Wanda McClain said nurses now have a voice in decisions regarding patient care policies and equipment needs.

“That brings the bedside nurse into what we refer to as shared governess,” she said. “They do a lot of research of current practices in other facilities in other states so that we’re kept abreast of current technologies, new medications, new theories on treatments and protocols” to enhance patient care and satisfaction.