Penn nurse manager brings health resources to her tribal community
Outside of her day job as a nurse manager for Penn Medicine at Home, Sherry ‘Strong Sun Spirit’ Caputo has helped bring mental health education, COVID resources, and nutrition programming to her tribal community, the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Tribal Nation in New Jersey.
2 min. read
Image: Courtesy of Sherry Caputo
By day, Sherry Caputo is a nurse manager for the home infusion program of Penn Medicine at Home, having grown its New Jersey team from serving 300-some patients when she started in 2018 to nearly a thousand today. Outside of work, Sherry “Strong Sun Spirit” Caputo, a longtime member of the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Tribal Nation, applies her experience in personalized health care to help members of her tribe. For the last three years, Caputo has served on the tribal council for the New Jersey state-recognized tribe of about 2,000 members and now acts as its secretary.
During the pandemic, Caputo stepped up as COVID coordinator for the tribe, helping members get access to vaccines and masks. She also started a health and wellness committee. Additionally, Caputo has partnered with different organizations to bring nutrition programming, cancer screenings, and other resources and education to seniors in the tribal community.
Last fall, she applied for and received a Penn Medicine CAREs grant to provide mental health education for the tribe. Partnering with the National Alliance on Mental Illness, Caputo worked to educate tribal council and committee members on what to do if somebody is in crisis—to provide strategies on de-escalation and keeping everyone safe.
“Part of health and wellness is: How can we best help everybody as a group?” says Caputo. “Looking at all the situations after COVID, with the increases in road rage and just a lot of stuff, it just seems like people really need some outlets and some resources.”
Pointing to the need, she notes the close connection between mental health and addiction and research showing that Native Americans nationwide experience higher rates of substance abuse. She says the work she is doing expands efforts tied to a grant the tribe got from the state of New Jersey for education around drug and alcohol abuse. The tribe has also been able to expand mental health programming to its youth group to help teens identify warning signs for depression and suicide and to encourage dialogue.
Caputo serves as a source of information in her close-knit tribal community, which she says can be less trusting of outsiders. She says tribal members who know she is a nurse will ask her about medications and conditions. “Through my work life, I know about different programs, and I understand about different resources that are out there,” says Caputo, “so I feel like it’s really been helpful.”
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