Friendly face welcomes international nurses
By Elissa Bass
The first thing Noreen Gorero, MA, BSN, RN, CNML, does when asked about her Healthcare Hero award from the Hartford Business Journal is make sure her colleagues are recognized with her.
“I am very happy to speak with you about the Hartford Business Journal Healthcare Hero award,” she writes in an email. “There are three of us who took turns orienting the international nurses, me, Paul Paseos and Sui Ping Suen. Although I did most of the orientation, I do not want to take away from my peers the value of their work and recognition.”
It’s this we-are-all-in-this-together mindset that sets Gorero apart at Hartford HealthCare, where she began in 2017 as senior director of operations for the Heart & Vascular Institute in the Hartford Region. In 2022, she was named the first director of patient and family transitions for HVI and where patient experience scores soared under her leadership.
A member of the system’s Asian & Pacific Islander Colleague Resource Group (API CRG), she took a leadership role with the international nursing program bringing nurses from the Philippines here to work. She carefully forged relationships with the new nurses that was more friend than mentor.
“Each month, new batches of international nurses were brought to CESI for skills training and evaluation,” she says. “We would come in and introduce ourselves as members of the API CRG. I gave them all my business card and cell phone number so they had a person to call for help. They know they can call me any time. It was not set up as a professional mentor/mentee relationship.”
Gorero helped with challenges with housing, public transportation, shopping for Asian food, learning to drive, banking, schools for the nurses’ children and finding church services. Any challenge stemming from being new to the U.S. and Connecticut came her way.
“I would message them if I had furniture being given away so they can pick it up to use in their new apartments,” says Gorero who, with her husband, are members of the Connecticut chapter of the Philippine Nurses Association of America.
In addition, she spends considerable time and energy providing underserved communities with access to healthcare through free screenings offered in various neighborhoods around Hartford.
Al Rameni is breaking barriers
By Elissa Bass
Dina Al Rameni, MD, a cardiac surgeon and newest member of Hartford HealthCare’s transplant team at Hartford Hospital, has always been fascinated by the idea of placing one person’s organ into another person’s body to save and/or extend their life.
Growing up in Jordan with an eye to a career in surgical medicine, specifically transplant surgery, Dr. Al Rameni realized she would have to study abroad to learn all types of organ transplant techniques. Only live donor transplants are performed in Jordan, limiting the work to livers and kidneys.
“In the U.S., if a patient is brain dead, they can give all their organs to multiple recipients,” she explains. “It is truly a gift of life from someone to so many.”
Dr. Al Rameni focused on abdominal area transplants at first but at an organ procurement she saw a cardiothoracic team step in to procure heart and lungs.
“I just thought what they were doing was so cool and cutting edge,” she remembers.
So, she made the switch.
In her first four months in Hartford, Dr. Al Rameni performed four transplants, including the hospital’s first beating heart transplant, and assisted in five others. She also provides a full range of adult cardiac surgeries. She is the first female transplant surgeon here – something that does not go unappreciated by her — and cardio-thoracic surgeon, Sheelagh Pousatis, MD.
“She is partly what inspired me to come to Hartford,” Dr. Al Rameni says. “She is a badass, a great surgeon.”
Knowing that only 3% of heart surgeons are female — a number that’s even smaller in transplant — she feels an obligation to promote the field and mentor others.
“It is a very demanding field and there are really unpredictable hours. Hearts aren’t available between nine and five. It could be 2 a.m. or 3 p.m. when you get the call, and you must respond. So, I am very passionate in promoting the field and advocating for more women by being active on social media,” she says.
A recent high point was noting that her entire OR team was female.
“We took a photo and I posted it on social media. Hopefully it can encourage other women to break the barrier,” she says.