5 Questions for Kay Malone, Medical Reviewer

5 Questions is our ongoing feature where we introduce you to the people who make Brandywine Counseling run, spotlighting a different staff member every two weeks.

Name: Kay Malone
Job: A former Nurse, Supervisor, and Director of the Medical Department. Now a retired consultant who conducts internal audits of client charts.
Time with BCI: 32 years

1. You’ve been with Brandywine Counseling for over 30 years. How have the agency and our clients changed in that time?
When I came, we had 12 employees and 55-70 clients. Right now we have somewhere in the neighborhood of 145 employees and 2000 clients. The clients are much younger [today] than they were when we first started. They’re a great deal sicker than they were then.

When I first came I was part time. I was just a Staff Nurse. At that time we were in the annex across the street from [Wilmington] Hospital. We had a wonderful time. We went through nurses really quickly. When we hired them, they didn’t last very long.

In 1984 we became a private nonprofit and moved to 12th Street. At that time, I was the Nursing Supervisor. We really had a strange arrangement there. Very small areas, we opened out into an alley, it was very strange. Then, we left there and went to 4th Street - much bigger place. We had more nurses and we had a larger area. Each time we have moved it’s always been to a nicer place, a better place.

It’s been quite a ride! We’ve had a lot of fun with it, and a lot of growth. Lots of different programs started, the Outreach and Perinatal. It’s really been something else. I’m very proud that I was involved in it, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

2. What has been the most rewarding moment for you since you’ve been at BCI?
One time, my husband and I want to a wedding of a [former] client who [later] worked here, and in his receiving line was a man who was a client at one time. And as were going through the receiving line, he stopped me, and he grabbed my husband Bob, and said to him, “This lady saved my life! She threw me out of Brandywine! I hated her!” It was so funny! Bob didn’t know what to do or say. And he said, “And thank God for her, because if she hadn’t done that, I’d have been dead by now for using drugs.”

That’s very rewarding. That makes me feel really good about the fact that I was able, with the help of God and all of the staff here, to have some measure of influence on people. I know there were so many people that often thought I was so mean, but a lot of them have come back and said, well, you did the right thing at the right time. I loved them. I did not want them to kill themselves, so if that means tough love, then that’s what you use.

3. What advice do you have for someone who would like to work in this field?
You have to have a feel for people, and you have to be extremely nonjudgmental, but you also have to have a sense of that tough love. I think sometimes, when people first come [to work] here, it might scare them. This isn’t easy, but if you have in your heart what you really want for the clients, [you can do a lot of good]. There has been a lot of recovery over the 30-some years I’ve been here. It’s not routine nursing, and if a nurse comes here to get a job, and thinks it’s going to be like a doctor’s office or a hospital, they are very quickly shown how wrong that is. You couldn’t work here if you weren’t a people person, but I think most nurses are.

4. Many longtime BCI staff who are in recovery were first interviewed and hired by you. Why was it important to you to hire people in recovery, and what qualities did you look for in an employee?
It was important to give them a second chance if they could convince me that they really wanted another chance to get their stuff together. I hired them because they knew the other side of the counter. They could put their feet in the clients’ moccasins. They’ve been there, they’ve done that. I hadn’t been there, I never did that. And so when they look at me and say, “This lady’s from the suburbs, what does she know?” I don’t know as much as you know, but I’m certainly going to learn from you. And I knew that if we could get them to the point where they were really proud of what they were doing, and believed in themselves as much as I believed in them, I knew that it would be one of our biggest assets.

And look, it has proven to be! Look how many of our employees are in supervisory positions, and are working here for a long time. I think they’re wonderful, wonderful employees. You just had to get them to the point where they believed in themselves, and that they could do it. Because most of the time, they had been treated like crap, and they felt like they were, and it didn’t have to be that way. Somebody just had to believe and give them a chance to do it.

5. If you had $30,000 to donate to BCI, what would you do with it?
It would go to the Perinatal program. I started the Perinatal program because of my interest in moms and babies, and children, toddlers. I would want very much to have a house just for the Perinatal program, for the moms and the babies, and to have for them a better life and really nice surroundings.