Shining the light on local nurses

Lois Fairley Community Service Award shared throughout the community

Anna Cabrera

The year was 1918 and the Salvation Army had decided to purchase a large home on Crawford Avenue in Windsor, responding to the need for more hospital beds in the growing city.

Two years later, Salvation Army Grace Hospital would become the Salvation Army’s first general hospital in Canada. Over the years, Grace Hospital would grow from its original 28-bed maternity facility to a 122-bed general hospital. New wings were added in 1942 and 1945. In June of 1960, a fire destroyed much of the hospital, so a new, five-story facility was built and opened in 1966.

What might be most memorable, and beneficial, to the region about Grace Hospital was its nursing program, which also opened in 1920. To manage the burgeoning numbers of incoming nursing students, Grace Hospital’s School of Nursing added a nursing residence in 1954 and graduated nearly 1,600 students until the program moved to St. Clair College in 1973.

One of those nurses was the beloved Lois Fairley. Fairley graduated from the hospital’s nursing program in 1955 and spent her career serving patients at Grace Hospital, first as a nurse and then head nurse. She also served on the provincial board of directors of the Registered Nurses Association of Ontario (RNAO), was president of the Ontario Nurses Association and a member of St. Clair College’s nursing program advisory committee. Fairley died in 2007 and in her honour, the RNAO instituted an award in her honour: the Lois Fairley Community Service Award.

“There’s a common thread among nurses our family knows all too well,” says Fairley’s son, John.

“We always knew there was no clock with my mother. She would get up at 5:30 in the morning to be in for seven as a head nurse at Grace Hospital, and it could be a seven-hour shift or a 12-hour shift or a 14-hour shift, but it didn’t matter. She had to be there.

“We weren’t the family who wondered what was for supper at four o’clock because mom got home when she got home, when her job was done.” Fairley adds, “There’s a sensitivity I have now, something I think we don’t understand until we’re adults, to the kind of selflessness this profession has.

“Having my father on shift work at Hiram Walker security, and my mother in a day job which was supposed to be from seven to three but ended up being seven to whenever… there are a lot of families in our community that are the sons and daughters or spouses of nurses, and I’ve learned that we must have a bit more grace in our lives for these individuals.

“We can all learn to be as compassionate and enduring as they are.”

Through the years, the Lois Fairley Nursing Award accepted nominations for nurses who were recognized to have “had extreme dedication and loyalty that really, all nurses have,” explains Fairley. But in 2021, rather than granting the award to a single nurse, the RNAO decided to acknowledge all nurses throughout the county, because of the collective commitment among thenm all to join in the fight against COVID-19.

And then in 2021, Fairley says the nominations that came in seemed to be following a trend. The nursing community wanted to tip a hat to nurses coming from and returning to every sector: nursing homes, vaccine centres, home care groups and hospitals.

“There were so many nurses who came back, the ‘golden girls,’” he says. “(They were) the ones who rolled up their sleeves and returned to where they worked for 20, 30 years and said, ‘I can still give.’”

This year, the Lois Fairley Award returns to acknowledge an individual, someone who has been recognized for impacting the life of a patient, a family, their workplace or their community.

John says that it is “wonderful there’s a whole week of celebrating nurses,” and that for him and his family, this award is a continual reminder of what nurses give every day, “just as my mother gave.

“It’s an honour that there are nurses who can be celebrated in my mother’s name,” he continues. “But they’re also sharing this award with people and caregivers from all over Windsor-Essex for whom the light doesn’t necessarily shine.

“As a family, we’re honoured to be able to help tell somebody’s story, to shine that light and to say thank you.”

The 16th Annual Lois Fairley Nursing Award takes place during Nursing Week, May 8 – 14. For details, visit windsoressexrnao.org.