A New Way of Care: Nancy Perry

Help­ing peo­ple is more than a job for Nan­cy Per­ry. It’s her pur­pose. When the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic changed the world as we knew it, she had to find a new way to ful­fill that purpose.

Per­ry is a behav­ioral health ther­a­pist for Quin­cy Med­ical Group (QMG) who serves our rur­al com­mu­ni­ties. Before the pan­dem­ic, she logged up to 500 miles a week in her car trav­el­ing between Mt. Ster­ling, Pitts­field, Win­ches­ter, and four area nurs­ing homes see­ing patients. That all changed in March of 2020.

“When the pan­dem­ic hit, I could no longer have appoint­ments in per­son. I start­ed to think about all the time I was spend­ing on the road and thought, ​‘How can I use these hours in a dif­fer­ent way that would bet­ter serve my clients?’,” she shared.

Inno­va­tion and think­ing out­side of the box have always been dri­ving forces in Perry’s more than 30 years as a ther­a­pist. When the pan­dem­ic forced peo­ple to stay home, the need for her ser­vices didn’t go away. In fact, Per­ry said the demand was greater, so she had to find a new way. That’s when she turned to Telehealth.

Tele­health allowed patients to keep their appoint­ments with­out com­ing in the office. With the assis­tance of a smart­phone, smart device, or com­put­er, a patient could see their ther­a­pist vir­tu­al­ly from wher­ev­er they were.

“I told patients I want you to feel as safe as if you were sit­ting in my office. So, I worked with peo­ple to find out the best place for their appoint­ments. Maybe it’s your car? Maybe it’s work? We real­ly tried to fig­ure out what works best for each per­son and how they can feel the most com­fort­able,” explained Perry.

With the addi­tion of Tele­health, Per­ry found she got to know her patients at a deep­er lev­el than if they were in the same room.

“I was real­ly able to help peo­ple who might not have got­ten help before. I found peo­ple were more leery about com­ing in, but they were more com­fort­able in their own homes. We were able to go more in-depth,” she shared.

She also con­tin­ued her work with local nurs­ing homes, where the pan­dem­ic cre­at­ed dif­fi­cult cir­cum­stances for both res­i­dents and staff.

“To be in a nurs­ing home at this time, how scary would that be? Not just scary for res­i­dents, but for staff too. I want­ed to con­tin­ue to sup­port them, so I worked with nurs­ing home staff to see what I could do. We got cre­ative using iPads or Face­Time,” she shared.

After a chal­leng­ing cou­ple of years nav­i­gat­ing the pan­dem­ic, Per­ry said the need for men­tal health ser­vices has grown. With that, she encour­ages every­one to show kind­ness to each other.

“Hav­ing empa­thy and under­stand­ing that we’re all hav­ing a hard time. Hav­ing com­pas­sion for each oth­er and know­ing we’re in this together.”

For more infor­ma­tion on Behav­ioral Health ser­vices at QMG, vis­it https://​quin​cymed​group​.com/​m​e​d​i​c​a​l​-​s​e​r​v​i​c​e​s​/​b​e​h​a​v​i​o​r​a​l​-​h​e​alth/.