[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 150 (2004), Part 8]
[EXTEN]
[Page 10098]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




 HONORING THE VISITING NURSE ASSOCIATION OF SOMERSET HILLS, NEW JERSEY

                                 ______
                                 

                      HON. RODNEY P. FRELINGHUYSEN

                             of new jersey

                    in the house of representatives

                         Tuesday, May 18, 2004

  Mr. FRELINGHUYSEN. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor the Visiting 
Nurse Association of Somerset Hills, Somerset County, New Jersey in my 
Congressional District. The Visiting Nurse Association of Somerset 
Hills is celebrating one hundred years of providing excellence in 
community health care.
  Despite its humble beginnings, the Association's history is a proud 
one. The Visiting Nurse Association began as the vision of Miss Lillian 
Nichols, a parish nurse connected to St. Bernards Episcopal Church who 
attended to the ailing and meager in 1903. In 1904, a group was 
fashioned and be accountable for her assistance to the people of 
Somerset Hills consisting of the towns of Basking Ridge, Bernardsville, 
Chester Borough, Gladstone, and Mendham Borough, to name a few. And so 
began the Visiting Nurse Association, one of the original 100 groups in 
the United States. Soon, as more and more of her thankful patients 
availed themselves of its services, it became clear that the 
Association was desperately needed in this fast-growing area in 
Northern New Jersey.
  The founding committee was incorporated in 1906 as the Visiting Nurse 
Association and transferred into a habitat built by the friends of the 
Association on Olcott Avenue in Bernardsville. In 1910 the VNA started 
educational programs on sanitation and preventative health procedures 
that carry on in the present day. In 1933 the Great Depression forced 
the VNA to increase its efforts at social work. They provided milk, cod 
liver oil and coal to reduce poverty and malnutrition, and 708 patients 
visited that year, an increase of six-fold in one year!
  By 1937 the new VNA Constitution and by-laws increased the number of 
Board of Trustees members to 40. In 1970 the `Year of Vaccination for 
the VNA' nurses attempted to eliminate Rubella, or German measles, 
through the vaccination of 4,435 children. Soon after, diabetes 
screening by the VNA started. And in 1984, the treatment of the 
incurably sick at home, was started by the VNA and their Hospice 
Program flourished. Five years later, the Somerset Hills Adult Day Care 
Center opened, a VNA affiliate that offers a social day care program to 
the elderly and disabled.
  Today, with the same careful attention and dedicated service Lillian 
Nichols provided a century ago, the nurses of the Visiting Nurse 
Association of Somerset Hills are helping to heal the sick, the 
injured, the elderly and the needy of Somerset County.
  Mr. Speaker, I ask that you and my colleagues in the House of 
Representatives join with me in congratulating the Visiting Nurse 
Association of Somerset Hills, and all of the association's outstanding 
staff, employees and volunteers, upon celebrating its 100th 
Anniversary.

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