Meet the Compassion Companion for Hospital Patients

Meet Daily Point of Light Award honoree Derald Peters. Read his story, and nominate an outstanding volunteer or family as a Daily Point of Light.

Since 2013, Derald Peters has been a volunteer patient companion at Bergan Mercy Hospital, bringing smiles and comfort to hospital patients. With a simple greeting and a wish to make people smile, he’s been a consistent presence in people’s lives when they need it most. Derald has a remarkable ability to connect with patients, helping to ease their anxiety, share in their grief and offer them a reason to be hopeful. His dedication is so well-known that hospital staff frequently request his visits, recognizing the therapeutic impact he has on their patients’ healing journeys.

Even a personal health crisis couldn’t stop Derald’s mission. After a severe injury that required 21 surgeries, he spent two years as a patient himself. During this time, he logged over 10,000 phone calls to other patients from his hospital bed, ensuring they had someone to talk to who wasn’t a masked hospital staff member. Once he regained the ability to walk, he returned to the hospital, using a walker to visit patients. Now, at nearly 78, he navigates the hospital corridors on a three-wheeled electric scooter, allowing him to continue his valuable service without tiring out.

Derald’s volunteers eight hours a week and is on call for medical staff. He also serves on the Patient Family Advisory Committee, where he advocates for improvements and helps identify opportunities for a better patient experience. In addition, he participates in the Volunteer Focus Group, working to address the ongoing challenge of recruiting new volunteers. His dedication has even caught the attention of medical students who have shadowed him to learn how to build rapport with patients.

For Derald, volunteering is more than just an activity; it’s a calling. As he says, he hopes to continue his service for as long as he can, and for the countless lives he’s touched, that’s a wish we can all be thankful for. Read more about what inspires Derald to keep volunteering.

Tell us about your volunteer role.

The organization is the Bergan Mercy Hospital, which is part of the CHI Health Hospital system. I’ve been volunteering there for over 10 years. My volunteering vocation is to knock on doors and visit with people, help ease some of their anxieties and loneliness. So many people in hospitals don’t have families nearby, so I try to fill in the gaps when those situations happen. My wife also volunteers while I do, holding premature babies in the NICU.

Occasionally, medical students follow me. We have teaching at the hospital, and they sometimes have medical students who have never met a patient before shadow me to learn how to meet and greet a patient. One or two follow me in, and I tell them before we go in that a patient is not a condition, they’re not a diagnosis and they’re not a room number. They’re a person. Go in and visit them like you would your mother or your grandmother. A lot of these students thank me for that, because they had never been into a situation where they had to meet a patient in the hospital other than trying to diagnose something.

How did you keep volunteering even when you yourself were hospitalized?

For three years, I was not able to be there in person to volunteer, but I continued to volunteer. I’ll tell you how. I’d injured my leg in a fall, and I went through 21 surgeries, plus rehab facilities and endured some infections. It was a long ordeal, but I never gave up volunteering. While I was immobile, I was in a different hospital in Omaha having my surgeries, and every day a coordinator at Bergen Mercy Hospital, which is the largest Catholic hospital in the state, would send me a list of all the patients on one or two floors. Just their names and their ages. I would lay in my hospital bed at one hospital and call them and do phone visits with them. It was during COVID, where they had no visitors, and I had no visitors, so we all had free rein of time.

Over the three-year period, my coordinator had logged that I made over 10,000 phone calls to visit patients. And after I regained some ability to return in the physical presence at the hospital, I started coming with my walker. After going up and down the halls so much, I would get fatigued. So I purchased an electric scooter that comes apart in five pieces and fits in my trunk, and now I put it together, and I ride through the hospital. I got a three-wheel one so that I can spin around on a dime! I can go into rooms and around patients’ beds – it makes it so easy for me. I do that two days a week, on Mondays and Thursdays, for about four or five hours each day.

Why is connecting with people so important?

It’s not just in times of need. I think people need to be connected all the time, but especially when they have no one else to talk to. I see patients that say, “Well, I do have family visit me, but it’s only for a couple hours each week.” The rest of the time, they see white coats and they count ceiling tiles. Look out the window, wish and wonder. I went through that process while I was in rehab in the hospital for three years. I was only home for 15 weeks in one year period, and it was all during COVID. I sat there and looked out the window, and I couldn’t have any visitors. And it was very difficult, but it’s so important that people be able to reach out and talk to others. It helps their mental condition, and it also helps their physical condition.

I’m a retired pharmacist and so is my wife. We practiced for 50 years, and we have this feeling of compassion towards other human beings, which we always had while we practiced. In pharmacy, you’re always dealing with sick people, and we wanted to continue that after we left the practice of pharmacy. And this is the niche that each of us individually and collectively found, and it’s been working really well.

What are your long-term plans or goals volunteering with the hospital?

I hope to do this until the day I pass on. I’m 78 now. I just hope my health can stay as stable as it is, so I can continue until I can’t do it anymore.

What’s been the most rewarding part of your work?

Thinking about the people I’ve visited during the day and about the conversations that I had with them. I have a special prayer process that I do for the patients to help them heal, to improve and to return to their families or to their former life. The reward is at the end of the day, just thinking about the people that I visited during that day. It’s beautiful.

What have you learned through your experiences as a volunteer?

I had my first experience of volunteering when I was a freshman in college. I was teaching prisoners how to read and write, and I found out how rewarding volunteering can be. I brought an inmate from first grade to fourth grade over one semester, and I was elated by the fact that he had learned that much.

There’s no way to describe the joy of bringing joy to another person. The most important thing that I’ve learned is to learn is to listen. Listening is the key, and I try to start conversations with an open-ended question. Everybody has a story, every life has story and people are willing to talk about their lives if you give them time.

Why is it important for others to get involved with causes they care about?

In my faith, we are asked to visit the sick, to visit the imprisoned. I try to follow that creed. Visiting people not only uplifts their mood, but it’s been shown to help them physically heal. I’ve visited people that had total turnarounds, who have said they’ve never felt so good in their lives. People have gone from being ready to give up to being in such a better place with visits. Every patient that I see is a person like me, with problems, issues, handicaps, broken bones. I relate to that. So it’s like they’re visiting me, too. It’s like looking in a mirror.

What do you want people to learn from your story?

Love your fellow man as you would love yourself.

Do you want to make a difference in your community like Derald? Find local volunteer opportunities.