An Advocate for Both Patients and the Profession

Marie Riehl, M.S.N., RN, OCN, is the clinical manager for Fox Chase Cancer Center’s Buckingham, Pennsylvania, satellite facility. Marie is an experienced leader who has been at Fox Chase for more than 30 years, beginning as a staff nurse.

In 2023, she was selected to help set up an infusion/medical oncology clinic at the Buckingham location, alongside an existing Fox Chase radiation oncology facility. It has been her tireless efforts that have brought a new cohesive unit together from scratch in just a short amount of time.

Remarkably, she had not previously had much involvement in infusion. Marie has few limits to her professional comfort zone. In recent years, she completed a master’s degree and now has taken on a project in a field that was relatively new to her. However, her natural curiosity and sense of purpose — particularly, Fox Chase’s patient-focused mission — guided her through the project.

In the years I have known Marie, I could attribute her success to her open-mindedness and her commitment to patient care. She is not set in her ways and was never one to sit still in an office. Instead, she rolled up her sleeves and studied the entire enterprise from the perspective of a new patient experiencing the anxiety of the treatment of a frightening disease in an unfamiliar setting. It is that ability to see through someone else’s eyes that makes her an extraordinary patient advocate.

Working in a new satellite facility may be complicated and somewhat resource-constrained, but Marie knows that communication is the key to success in serving patients. She strives to bring teams together to focus on balancing competing priorities to make patients and their families more comfortable in the clinic.

She extends her advocacy to the outside community, and actively contributes to and partici­pates in ways to support a local nonprofit organization in Bucks County that provides wellness and holistic services for patients with cancer and their families. Marie is also a committed advocate of the nursing community and recently was elected to the Bucks and Montgomery Counties Chapter of the Oncology Nursing Society. She seeks out ways to connect nurses at separate institutions to encourage professional growth in the region. A tireless mentor, she takes a personal role in supporting both early-career nurses preparing for certification exams as well as more experienced nurses preparing for their oncology certified nurse certification.

Her open-mindedness and her indomitable spirit inspire all of us toward excellence in our profession. Her kindness and compassion for patient-focused medicine inspire all of us to simply be better people. For these reasons, I would like to nominate Marie Riehl for the CURE Extraordinary Healer Award.

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