OLATHE, Kan. — Ruth Herrada and her three children share more than genetics — they share a desire to help others.
All four family members work as nurses and certified nursing assistants at Olathe Medical Center.
“They call us the Herradas,” Ruth said. “Everyone in the hospital knows they’re my kids.”
Ruth’s daughter Sarah works with her in the Stroke Unit. Ruth’s other daughter, Neysa, works in the Emergency Room, and her son Jacob works in the Cardic Unit.
Jacob Herrada said he was destined for a career in nursing.
“I have been around hospitals and nursing homes all my life,” he said.
Ruth Herrada has been working at Olathe Medical Center for 15 years. Before she joined the hospital, she was an accountant.
“Growing up, we’d take these personality tests and it always said your career path would be health care,” Ruth Herrada said. “That always put a bug in my ear, and I decided I would go back to school.”
A couple months after Ruth Herrada started working at Olathe Medical Center in registration, her mother had a stroke. She said that event inspired her to work with patients who were recovering from a stroke.
“When (my mom) was in the ICU, there was one nurse. She was my favorite nurse,” Ruth Herrada said. “She knew how to care for her, knew how to explain things to us and after that I was like, ‘I want to be that nurse -- a nurse that gives the family relief because I am there that day and explains it to where they understand.’”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Ruth Herrada and her family provided comfort to those families while helping each other and coworkers. For a period of time, Jacob Herrada worked on a COVID-19 unit, and said that support helped him get through the long days.
“Every once in a while they would get floated up there and they would work with me and see what I would see with the COVID patients and the struggle we went through on the fourth floor,” he said. “My family was with me for this whole year and a half.”
