Never Quit winner ‘brings a sense of humanness’ to patient care

Rose Fejerang helps people breathe.

A respiratory therapist at San Francisco General Hospital and member of AFSCME Local 3299, she knew from an early age what her calling was. She cultivated an interest toward “nurturing, caring and helping others.”

The coronavirus pandemic has made her job especially difficult, not to mention dangerous, frustrating and emotionally taxing. Yet far from throwing up her arms in the air, Fejerang has doubled down on providing the highest quality care to her patients.

“Rose always contributes to a calmness,” says Misty Scholz, one of her co-workers. “Definitely, she brings a sense of humanness. When the pandemic first started and we started seeing patients come in with COVID-19, she gave her all to the patients as well. We all did, but Rose … she’s really wonderful.”

“She’s very compassionate with our patients,” says Chanera Rahming, also a co-worker. “She’s very thorough and great about educating them and making sure that their needs are going to be met, even when they leave the situations that they’re in.”

For her exceptional service to her community, Fejerang is a winner of AFSCME’s Never Quit Service Award, which recognizes public service workers who go above and beyond the call of duty to make their communities better.

“Every time you see someone right in front of your eyes not being able to take their next breath, there’s definitely some heart breaking that happens…,” Fejerang says. “Seeing the death toll numbers just going up everywhere, I imagine every health care worker working in this pandemic has had multiple heartbreaks and has felt very defeated the last year and a half.”

What motivates her to keep going when things get tough, she says, is reminding herself why she chose to serve her community in the first place.

“I think I always go back to just loving what I do, knowing that being in health care is one of my life purposes…,” she says.

Watch Rose Fejerang tell her story in her own words.