Healing with Heart: Monica Patino’s Mission in Support of Latinx Families

A nurse at Stanford Children’s makes a lasting impact in the Latinx community, caring for children with serious heart conditions both within the hospital and abroad.

The road to becoming a staff nurse in the intensive care unit at Stanford Medicine Children’s Health wasn’t easy for Monica Patino, BSN, BA, RN, CCRN. She’d wanted to be a nurse from the time she was growing up in Colombia and had the chance to shadow a nurse at a hospital when she was in middle school. But she had an uphill battle after moving to Ohio from Colombia when she was 12.

“I came here without knowing any English,” she says. “I was the only Spanish-speaking child at my school, and it was a huge transition. It was really rough.” She persevered in learning about a new culture and became fluent in English. In high school, she studied hard to get into college while living in foster care. Patino worked her way through her first college degree, with jobs in the cafeteria and library, and then put herself through nursing school by working as a secretary in the infectious disease unit and, later on, as an interpreter at Nationwide Children’s Hospital. “Being able to take families who are immigrants by the hand and help them navigate the complex medical system through the whole process, from registration to their appointments to their follow-ups . . . I could connect with them, and I really loved it.”

Working as an interpreter turned out to be fortuitous. “It allowed me to work in every department in the hospital, and it’s how I knew that critical care was where I wanted to be,” she says. So, she set her sights on getting a job in the pediatric Cardiovascular Intensive Care Unit after graduating from nursing school. Patino feels that she found her calling as an intensive care nurse and draws on her experience as a hospital interpreter to help Spanish-speaking Latinx families and other non-English-proficient families. “Having a child who is sick at the hospital is daunting for anybody,” she says. “So, imagine being the parent whose child is sick, but you don’t speak the language and you aren’t accustomed to the hospital system. As clinicians, we really need to take the time to be more thorough with our Latino community, especially given the education level of some of our families, to make sure they understand their child’s diagnosis.”

Patino takes the time to help families in this way. “I try to tell them I that I understand what they’re going through, but more than that, I show it by going above and beyond. It’s about making sure they understood everything that’s going on, telling them their child is being well taken care of, and doing everything I can to advocate for them.”

Patino feels fortunate to be in the position she’s in, both career-wise and personally. When she has free time, she likes to work out, explore California’s national parks, and, above all, travel. “Growing up in Colombia, we were really poor,” she says. “Coming to the United States was the biggest opportunity, but I still never thought I would have the chance to travel the world. Now I can do things I never thought I could.” In the past six years, Patino has traveled to 17 countries.

Sometimes, she combines her love of travel with her passion for giving back to the Latinx community. Through an organization called Heart Trust, she’s gone on medical mission trips to mostly Spanish-speaking countries, including two trips to Guatemala and two to Costa Rica, to educate local health care workers about how to treat impoverished children with congenital heart defects. “It’s important for me to feel like I can impact my community in a positive way, and medical missions are one way that helps me fulfill that,” she says. “I want to lift up my community.”