At 3½ years old, Tyler Yerkes attended daycare at Gurwin Jewish Nursing & Rehabilitation Center in Commack, NY, while his mom, Julianne, worked as a registered nurse in Gurwin’s ventilator unit.
Now, 21 years later, Tyler has made an auspicious return, working as a certified nursing assistant in Gurwin’s rehab unit. His mother, meanwhile, holds the position of Assistant Director of Nursing, Infection and Wound Care.
“I feel like he’s actually grown up at Gurwin,” Julianne said.
Julianne Yerkes originally set out to study early childhood education, but she found nursing to be her calling. She worked in critical care for years, but needed less intensive hours and better access to childcare after having Tyler. Throughout those grueling shifts, she said, her time working with geriatric patients was the best.
“Geriatrics is what I love. They’ve lived their life and I want to make the rest of their life better,” she explained. “I swear it was like a miracle of God. I got this flyer in the mail that said Gurwin and they had on-site child care at the time.”
She’s been voted Best Nurse two-years in a row in the Bethpage Federal Credit Union’s 2024 Best of Long Island Awards. She now teaches the certified nursing assistant (CNA) training program, and taught her son Tyler two years ago.
Gurwin’s CNA training program lasts three weeks, offering students a paycheck and the opportunity to work for Gurwin after completing the New York state written and clinical final exam.
After a year of studying exercise physiology, Tyler decided to switch paths and take his mom’s suggestion to work at Gurwin as a resident care assistant (RCA), a position that was created to address the staffing shortage during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The position is now largely held only by CNA trainees in the time between their classes and when they take their state-sanctioned exam. It entails providing non-clinical care to residents to help keep them engaged.
“We were coloring with them, watching movies with them, getting to know them,” Tyler said. “Ever since then, I’ve just kind of fallen in love with what I do.”
Now a CNA, he said he’s planning to extend into a full-blown caregiving career.
“My mother is my biggest inspiration,” he said. “My goal is to follow in her footsteps and become a nurse.”
