Visiting Nurse Service executive director addresses Kiwanis Club members April 4. Photo by Brooke Davis

BY BROOKE DAVIS
Kiwanis Club

Jack Allison, the new executive director of the Los Alamos Visiting Nurse Service, Inc., spoke at Kiwanis on April 4, outlining the work of LAVNS.

Allison, who is a registered nurse himself, is no stranger to the Southwest. He was an emergency tech in Colorado, and also worked in Santa Fe before coming to Los Alamos where he first served as the director of Sombrillo Skilled Nursing and Rehabilitation Center. His specialties are hospice care and palliative care (pain and symptom management) and his desire to be involved in more actual nursing led to his joining LANVS in 2019.

LAVNS was founded in 1973 and is dedicated to maintaining the highest possible good health in the service area. Their core values are person and family centered and seek to preserve patient dignity with compassion, collaboration, empowerment, and partnership.

The organization provides wound care, physical therapy, medication management, pain management, chronic disease education, fall prevention and safety education, palliative care and hospice care. Allison said that 40 to 50 percent of their workload is skilled nursing. They also provide social services including personal care, spiritual care, volunteer support, bereavement support and physician services.

LANVS can now provide ketamine therapy for hospice patients to help them with depression, anxiety and fear of death. They recently became the only home health service in New Mexico that can provide medical aid in dying for their service area.

“We can cover just about anybody,“ Allison said, and he added that they are currently fully staffed to serve the community.