Carolyn Morrison A Full Circle Life
in the Emergency Department until Don retired from General Motors in 2000. It was then they decided to move the family up to the Thumb of Michigan. “In the eighties, we bought a summer cottage on Sand Point. We’d come up for the weekends with the kids and enjoy spending time on the boat,” Carolyn beamed, “At the time it was just a summer home; it was only a two-bedroom and did not have any heat. But with four kids, we decided to add onto it and make it into a year-round home.” That’s where Carolyn’s journey at Scheurer began as the manager of Acute Care. She continued her career at Scheurer for 10 years as the manager before she retired in 2010. “It was very interesting starting work at Scheurer because it was much smaller than the facility I had worked at in Rochester. It felt like being back in Iowa with the slower, small-town feel. When I first started at Scheurer I, of course, did not know everybody but I got to know them quite well since everyone is so friendly and caring. Right after my husband died (in 2005), everyone thought that I was going to move back down to Detroit, but I said ‘no’ just because I liked working up here so much and everyone was so kind and generous when that happened.” One of the first jobs that Carolyn was tasked with was to find a
computer system for the start of digital medical records. Up to that point, doctors were still writing all orders by hand. “My team and I had to go out, research and find out what kind of computer system we needed for our small, independent hospital. We had three different trips to small hospitals that set up their own digital systems. We traveled as far as Maine to see what we could do back home at Scheurer.” Carolyn ranks implementing a digital medical record system as one of her biggest accomplishments, “It was great to get into this new world of computers and convincing the doctors that they needed to get on the computers and send us the orders rather than writing them out. It completely changed how we did our work.” Dwight Gascho was the President & CEO of Scheurer at that time and tasked Carolyn with that massive overhaul. She always had a great relationship with
him and in fact, only lived a few houses apart. “If the weather was bad enough, I would get a call from Dwight saying that he was going to pick me up and take me to work, so I didn’t have to worry about getting to work in the snow. I thought that was extremely nice of him to do, but with that, I would always tease him that I would never get a snow day. When the CEO offers to pick you up and take you to work, you go to work, you know?” Carolyn laughed. Winter and the offseason on Sand Point would get a bit lonely for Carolyn so she figured she would stay at Country Bay Village just for the winter months. As she got older, she decided to make her full-time with Scheurer Senior Living. “It’s been amazing living at Country Bay. Everyone is so caring and you still get to be very independent. You get a menu each week and get to choose what you would like to
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