The power of nursing and radio

The Ville Platte Rotary Club capped off its meetings this month with a busy slate. The club heard about certified legal nurse consultants as well as updates to the city’s radio station KVPI. The club was also caught up on Hurricane Harvey and it’s potential affects to the Tee-Cotton Bowl.
Deborah Enicke was the guest of Rotarian Renee Tate at the meeting on August 22. Enicke is a registered nurse and a certified legal nurse consultant. She informed the Rotary Club that her field is new to the area. “Most of the legal nurse consultants in Louisiana are located around the New Orleans area,” she said. “I’m currently sub-contracted with another legal nurse consultant on the East Coast, and that’s primarily where the most legal nurse consultants seem to be utilized more heavily.”
For the last 40 years, Enicke has been a registered nurse working primarily as an emergency room nurse and in home health. She explained to Rotary what her new role is.
“Anytime there’s a medical record involved whether it’s personal injury, workers’ comp, or product liability, my role as a legal nurse consultant is to summarize, analyze, and organize the medical records,” she said. “I work as that bridge between the attorney and the world of medicine.”
“My current job provides me with an opportunity to use that clinical knowledge that I’ve built up over 40 years and to look at the medical records,” she added. “It’s almost like reconstructing what happened. My goal is to look at what went wrong and how to prevent that from going wrong again to save someone else.”
With Hurricane Harvey still bearing down on the Gulf Coast, Rotary President Wayne Vidrine at the meeting on August 29 implored the Rotarians to help out with relief. “There are a couple of hurricane disaster relief funds floating around,” he said. “One of them is sponsored by Rotary District 6200; however, we do have some local folks that will also be making some back-and-forth trips. I would like us as Rotary to support these locals who are actually touching those people one-on-one.”
The Rotary Club heard from members Jennifer Vidrine and Darwan Lazard on Harvey’s effects on the city and on the parish’s school system.
“Thank goodness our drainage is working well,” Mayor Vidrine said. “No streets flooded, and no homes flooded. But if you are having some drainage or ditch situations where you are, please call so we can go see about it. The crew worked around the clock this weekend doing everything that they possibly could do to prevent the flooding, so we were lucky thus far.”
As superintendent of schools in Evangeline Parish, Lazard told the Rotary Club that “right now all of our schools have not had any significant damage based on what we have received thus far.” He added, “We do want to keep all of our students and our personnel safe, and that’s most important to us in a situation like this.”
Jessie Muse with the Tee Cotton Bowl talked to the Rotary Club about how the storm could impact the game scheduled for Friday night. “As of now the weather is a factor, but we are still planning day-by-day, and as it stands right now everything is still on track,” he said. “Friday morning at probably 3:00 when I walk out of my house, I’ll see what the weather is doing, but we are set at any given time to cancel any event that we have.”
Mayor Vidrine chimed in on some of the activities that are planned for that day. “The parade so far is still on at 4:00 p.m. Anybody is welcome to join the parade, and the lineup is at the Boys and Girls’ Club.”
“We are still asking everyone to tailgate in front of your business,” she added. “We’re going to be doing it at city hall on the sidewalk with the tents just to show the NFL commissioner of tailgating how we tailgate with ox tail sauce, sauce piquant, and marinated pork. We bring tailgating to another level, and we want to display that.”
The guest speaker at the meeting was KVPI’s general manager Mark Layne, who told the Rotary Club about the station’s increase in power. “For years we were at 8,000 watts,” he said. “Three years ago we applied to the federal government to go up in power to 25,000 watts. We were approved three years ago, and it took three years to get the tower people down here. We are now at 25,000 watts, and it’s incredible.”
“The feedback that we are getting from people who never could hear us before over the air is incredible. Moss Bluff, Sulphur, Lake Charles, Alexandria, Marksville, Erwinville, and Scott are some of the areas where people are now listening to us on their old fashioned thing called radio. Our goal was to reach more listeners and, of course, to hopefully reach new advertisers.