After nearly 43 years of nursing at Martha’s Vineyard Hospital, Betsy VanLandingham is retiring this month — but she’s not immediately leaving the hospital where she first worked as a teenage volunteer.

“I was a candy striper, originally, when I was still in high school — in the old, old building,” Ms. VanLandingham said this week, during a work break on the hospital grounds.

For most of her MVH career, she worked in the emergency room. But the rise of Covid-19 created a new job for Ms. VanLandingham — one that isn’t ending with her retirement.

“I left the ER in December 2020, because a job came up to be a liaison between the hospital and boards of health,” she told the Gazette. “I’ve been coordinating Covid contact tracing since then, and really enjoyed it.”

She’s not sure how long the job will last, but the hospital is allowing her to keep her office, Ms. VanLandingham said.

“I’d like to at least get us through the hump of daily cases,” she said. “It’s getting better right now. We definitely had a surge at the end of August . . .  Now it’s gradually going down.”

Ms. VanLandingham's father was a doctor at the hospital.

Ray Ewing

Ms. VanLandingham's father was a doctor at the hospital.

Ray Ewing

Contact tracing is not a one-person job, she added.

“I have a team of people that we’ve trained and that participate in investigation,” Ms. VanLandingham said. “We’ve had probably well over a thousand cases.”

It was a busy summer in the emergency department as well, she said.

“I keep a very close watch on what goes in the ER. They were totally full for most of the summer,” Ms. VanLandingham said. “It’s quieted down now, so that it’s manageable, [but] there are times when it certainly gets busier.”

Health care is a family heritage for Ms. VanLandingham, the daughter of a nurse and a doctor, George Feil, who relocated the family to the Vineyard from Cleveland when she was in high school.

“My parents decided they wanted to move to a small New England town,” she said. “We had come for about five years in the summer, and they loved it.”

After summering in various towns, the family settled in Vineyard Haven, in a house on Mt. Aldworth street now known as the Nobnocket Inn, an award-winning bed and breakfast.

“My father was the third doctor to own it,” Ms. VanLandingham said. “He took over the practice of a physician who was leaving.”

There were six doctors on Martha’s Vineyard at the time, she said, and the year-round population was about 5,500.

After nursing school at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Ms. VanLandingham briefly worked in Iowa before finding her way back to the Island and the emergency room at MVH.

“I started working here and started a family and just never left, because I enjoyed the people I was working with and the hospital was such a nice family atmosphere — small enough to know everyone,” she recalled.

As the Island’s population grew and the hospital expanded, computerized reports replaced handwritten notes — a blessing for efficiency, but a limitation in other ways, she said.

“I told a really good story when I wrote it by hand,” Ms. VanLandingham said. “It was difficult . . . to be limited to choices instead of descriptions. But you get used to it.”

She’s seen the hospital take even greater steps forward over the years.

“When we got the telemedicine connection with Mass General for evaluating strokes . . .  we had instantaneous communication with [neurosurgeons in Boston],” Ms. VanLandingham said. “It was an incredible improvement in our care.”

And she has witnessed the hospital under threat from the elements, including a storm surge from Hurricane Bob 30 years ago, before the current hospital building was constructed.

“We had hardly any patients, and we all watched . . . we watched the water climb up the hill about halfway. It was a little worrisome. We had to go home the back way.”

One thing that has always struck her, Ms. VanLandingham said, is the consistent skill level of the medical workers who come to the hospital in the busy season.

“We’ve always had to hire extra staff in the summertime, and they come from all over the country . . . and they all just sort of plug in and fit in,” she said. “It’s like everyone, everywhere, is doing the same thing.”

Her father retired after 17 years in practice on the Island and died at the hospital in 2005. For a number of years, Ms. VanLandingham said, she would occasionally treat an older patient who remembered him.

Her own family has taken root here, with her sons Daniel and Erik and their children representing the third and fourth generations to make the Vineyard their home. She’s planning to see more of them in retirement, spend time in her garden and at the beach, and travel to visit her siblings — three sisters and a brother.

“I’m very lucky,” she said.