GEORGETOWN – Rachel Hersh didn’t always want to be a nurse, but she hasn’t turned back since she got into the field and now she gets to lead one of Delaware’s fastest-growing health care centers.
La Red Health Center has shone a beacon of hope for rural residents in Sussex County looking for healthcare since its humble 2001 beginnings as a helpline through a Delaware nonprofit called
La Esperanza. Those calls sought to connect non-English-speaking callers to local healthcare.
While the organization worked to break down those language barriers for residents, needs for the community continued to grow along with the population, including Delaware’s non-English-speaking residents, while the state started grappling with a shortage of medical providers for all demographics.
Just under 25 years later, La Red has grown from its days as a helpline into four full-fledged Federally Qualified Health Centers, the only one south of the Delaware Memorial Bridge. Three of the four centers are located in Sussex County; in recent years, La Red also opened a center at the
Wellness Village in Milford which straddles both Kent and Sussex Couties.
“La Red Health Center serves everyone, including our large senior population. We started as serving primarily the Hispanic community, but we serve everyone. We want to ensure that the growing Haitian population are also receiving health care and that the seniors of all demographics are receiving health care,”
Hersh said.
She was offered the role of CEO after La Red’s only CEO Brian Olson announced his retirement following more than two decades of service. Prior to his retirement, which became official on Dec. 27, Hersh served as La Red’s deputy director and CEO-elect.
“He and I have such similarities from our heart and truly wanting to do the work so we can enable our teams to do the work needed in our communities,” Hersh told the Delaware Business Times. “He believed in that very same way. It was great to learn that about him. We have very different methodologies in how we lead, but our hearts were the same.”
Excited is just one word she used to describe her new role after Olson’s legacy leadership, along with humbled and honored at the chance to combine her years of history and expertise in the public health sector in the more rural areas of Delaware.
“I try to talk to the people that come into La Red [for orientation]. I think one of the most important things a leader can do, that, and understanding your own journey and how it fits into the broader scheme of the work you’re doing. If you can do those things, you’re ahead of the curve,” she said.
For Hersh, her public health history began when she took a job in her early 20s at what is now called Eckerd Connects, a pioneering youth services organization dedicated to supporting the behavioral health needs of troubled youth.
“One of the first meaningful jobs I did was while I was living in Florida. I worked with at risk youth ages 12-18 who were sent there as a part of the juvenile justice system as an alternative to being locked up. There were no handcuffs, no jail cells,” she told DBT of the experience which led her to working in the woods for this wilderness-based program.
“What we had hoped to do, as a bunch of 20-somethings helping these kids. . . what did we know,” she chuckled, “was give them the ability to talk through something versus turning to physical violence and then they’d be much better equipped after discharge. Meanwhile, there were security guards wandering around to make sure we were okay. There was psychological warfare on both sides. It was one of those jobs where you’d come home on the weekend and cry, trying to figure out why you’re going back in two days.”
An injury led her away from the woods, leading her to branch out and land a personal trainer gig in Cincinnati, something she had come to love no matter where she was in the country.
While she was content no longer working in the same traumatic environment she found herself in in the woods of Florida, she wasn’t content only working as a personal training.
“Somebody said to me, ‘I don’t understand why you’re just a trainer. You’re so smart,’ and I found that slightly offensive. But I did want more,” Hersh said before highlighting her next job – assistant director of admissions, recruiting for licensed practical nurses at the private Brown Mackey College.
“I just thought those people were insane,” she joked. “Who wants to be a nurse? Why would you ever want to be a nurse? I was about 24 years of age and I would ask these nurses in Cincinnati who would walk to the school, ‘Why?’ You got the sense that these women were truly investing in their lives. It was truly meaningful work even though I thought they were crazy.”
Still on a journey to figuring out her own path in life, Hersh then moved on to work at an art institute but that wasn’t a great fit either, leaving her to wrestle with what might come next for the young, energetic powerhouse.
“I had to determine what I wanted to do. I didn’t want to keep working for a college, so I stayed at the art institute for a while. I was with a new guy who also worked at the art institute, so I wasn’t going to stay there long. I prayed on it,” she recalled. “Then I woke up on a Thursday morning and I had nursing on my heart and I thought, ‘You have got to be [kidding] me.’ At this point I’m in my late 20s, starting a nursing program at a hospital. I asked my mom, ‘Why didn’t you tell me I wanted to be a nurse?’ My Mom said, ‘You wouldn’t have listened.’”
Understanding her roots helped bring Hersh to her new role at La Red, but not before she experienced other Federally Qualified Health Centers as a nurse and leader, gaining more expertise in minority community groups and how their life experiences impact their health and medical care.
“In one hospital, I was working with cardiac patients who were having issues like strokes that they couldn’t control because they weren’t managing a very manageable condition. It was a very low-income area. We did amazing things in low-income communities; they were essentially like the families of the kids I worked with in Florida. The trauma and chaos of the socio-economic situation of what put these kids in the system in Florida, I could see it in the patients in Pittsburgh,” Hersh said. “It broke my heart. It made me want to learn more and more.”
With that fire-hose mentality, Hersh has learned even more at La Red while also working on a doctorate in public health, bringing her low-income and urban nursing experiences to Sussex, and now Kent, Counties which have significantly high and growing populations of non-English-speakers and low-income community members.
“It’s fantastic. Most of my, if not all of my, experience has really been in Black urban communities. So this is really my first foray in working in a rural community, as well as a Hispanic community. So it’s been like a fire hose of learning,” she said. “I’ve had a lot of frustrations in terms of the pace. Everybody can tell you about the pace of a rural community, but you don’t really know until you experience it. But you get used to it quickly. I have grown to love it. Everything connects here.”
She said she hopes to continue working to expand transparency, leadership and programming at La Red, to include new clinicians, while maintaining the family-like atmosphere that has kept many employees at the centers since its earliest days.
“I firmly believe that those doing the work should be the ones coming up with the solutions. So, we’ll be changing the culture to empower the teams so they feel they have the agency to make those decisions which takes time, it’s a really big shift, but it’s good for the organization,” she said. “It’s good for the company that they spent the time to look for the right person who can make this shift.”