Spalding nursing faculty member Erica Lemberger was among the seven individuals or organizations to be honored Thursday night, Feb. 22, as a Louisville Business First Health Care Hero.
Lemberger, a nurse practitioner who is an associate professor in the Spalding School of Nursing, was the winner among four finalists in the Patient Experience category. Lemberger has spent much of her career as a provider and advocate for medically vulnerable and underserved members of the population.
You can read a Business First profile of Lemberger, which describes her career and the influence of her family on it. She also explains her philosophy on serving patients and teaching students.
Another member of the Spalding nursing faculty, graduate programs director Pam King, was a finalist in the Community Outreach category and was also recognized at the Health Care Heroes dinner held at the Seelbach Hilton Hotel. They were announced as finalists in December.
Lemberger is in her first year at Spalding and teaches undergraduate population and community health courses.
Before that, she worked with pregnant and parenting teen mothers in local public high schools. She also serves on the board of Family and Children’s Place, which assists children and families affected by abuse, neglect and violence, and she is a certified forensic nurse and sexual assault nurse examiner.
From the Business First profile of Lemberger:
Lemberger’s resume reads like a primer on how to immerse yourself in a community’s hardest problems. As a family nurse-practitioner, she’s worked with chid abuse victims, cancer patients, homeless populations, pregnant teens and hospice. She was on a Louisville Metro racism task force, and she’s maintained a long and active involvement with Family and Children’s Place, Louisville and Southern Indiana’s only domestic abuse shelter.
“I hear people say, ‘How can you do that, it’s so hard?’ But that’s when people need us most,” Lemberger said. “I like working with people who don’t have a voice or are going through particularly difficult times in their lives. We all want to be heard, and we all want to be loved and do well.”
Read more about the historic Spalding School of Nursing the rest of the Spalding nursing faculty.