Mark Philbrick is a man on the move. A nurse by training, he has pulled teeth in the Amazon, held AIDS orphans in sub-Saharan Africa and sold software up and down the Eastern Seaboard. He's hired hundreds of nurses for Duke, entered academia at UNC and owned his own business.

And yet it's here, at the Hospice of Wake County, that he says he's found peace.

As vice president of clinical operations, Philbrick, 53, draws on his years of nursing, computer and management experience to anchor the growing hospice.

There is no mistaking Philbrick's dedication to hospice work: His voice quakes with emotion as he talks of "serving with my heart as well as my hands. ... Every day I am giving instead of receiving is a good day."

The hospice process, Philbrick explains, provides clients with nurses, social workers, chaplains and physicians; it's so effective that those who participate typically live a month longer than those who don't. And at the Hospice of Wake County, no patient is ever turned away because of his inability to pay.

Sixty percent of clients die at home, and all families receive 13 months of bereavement counseling.

That's why Philbrick is troubled that just 25 percent of eligible patients take advantage of hospice care.

"We're a very medical intervention-driven society," Philbrick said, "and I understand why some people want to exhaust every option. But of the people who come to us, one-third live less than a week, and another third live less than a month."

If patients got there sooner, Philbrick says, he could offer them closure and dignity at the end of life.

So far, his efforts have begun to pay off. The hospice has doubled in size since he has been there. The organization serves about 200 people per day, and it recently began building a 20-bed facility that will open in August 2009. It has increased efforts to expand coverage areas in rural and minority communities, especially in six counties next to Wake.

If Philbrick's passion is unmistakable, so is his ability to be at peace with mortality. For him, death is part of life

"Every family is a story, every person is a story," Philbrick muses, "and that's a metaphor I live by: Every great novel has good and bad, romance and tragedy, life and death in it."

Those who know Phibrick say he has found a calling that draws on the strengths of his character and experience.

Dr. W. Kevin Broyles, director of Duke Urgent Care, says, "Mark is one of the most perseverent and quietly determined people I've ever met in my life," Broyles says. "He's just steady, through all the loss and job changes he's just been steady, faithful. Because of his own hardships, he's become uniquely able to relate to those who have felt loss."

It's Philbrick's deeply rooted sense of modesty, Broyles says, that makes him a pleasure to work with. One time, Broyles recalled, he and Philbrick were traveling in Kenya, volunteering in the slums by day and staying with local families by night.

After spending much of the trip complaining about the uncomfortable bed he'd been sleeping in, Broyles was shocked to discover Phibrick had been sleeping on the floor. "He never said a word," Broyles says. "That's the depth of Mark's character."

Linda Cronenwett, dean of the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Nursing, remembers Philbrick for his unusual set of skills. "You don't usually juxtapose these deep compassionate and caring qualities with highly technical computer-type people," she says. "The fact that he's so good at both of those things is what makes him such a fantastic nurse, and an effective champion for hospice care."

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