Nurses Say Goodbye to Dolly Parton, Whose Giving Reached All the Way to the Bedside

Image source: @dollyparton

Dolly Parton died Aug. 25 at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center, surrounded by loved ones, in the health system she had championed for more than two decades. She was 80, and her team said she faced a brief battle with cancer.

Most of the world will remember the wigs, the wit, and the songs. Nurses will also remember the children’s hospital that carries her name, the birthing unit she helped build in her hometown, and the vaccine research she funded.

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Dolly Parton Children’s Hospital and Her Pediatric Giving

In February, Parton announced in a video message that East Tennessee Children’s Hospital in Knoxville was becoming Dolly Parton Children’s Hospital. Its pediatric nurses now clock in every shift under her name.

The renaming capped a long relationship with children’s hospitals in her home state. In Nashville, Parton funded the pediatric cancer program at Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt with what Vanderbilt calls a transformational contribution, given in honor of her friend Dr. Naji Abumrad and her niece, Hannah Dennison, who was treated there for leukemia as a child. In 2022, she added $1.0 million for pediatric infectious disease research at Vanderbilt, including work on antibiotic resistance and infections in children being treated for cancer. “I love all children,” she said when announcing that gift. “No child should ever have to suffer.”

This January, to mark her 80th birthday, she released a new version of her 1976 song “Light of a Clear Blue Morning” with Lainey Wilson, Miley Cyrus, Queen Latifah, and Reba McEntire, with proceeds benefiting pediatric cancer research at Monroe Carell.

Parton helped raise money to build LeConte Medical Center, a new hospital in Sevier County, Tennessee, where she grew up. A 2007 benefit concert brought in $500,000, and Dollywood and her Dixie Stampede dinner theater pledged $250,000 each, a combined $1.0 million for the project.

The hospital opened in Sevierville in 2010 with the 30,000-square-foot Dolly Parton Center for Women’s Services. The center includes the Dolly Parton Birthing Unit, where more than 600 babies were born in 2024. In a rural county, that access means families can deliver close to home.

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In April 2020, Parton gave $1.0 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center to support COVID-19 research, a gift honoring Abumrad that created the Dolly Parton COVID-19 Research Fund. The fund is credited alongside National Institutes of Health grants in Vanderbilt’s studies of Moderna’s mRNA vaccine, and it is acknowledged in the New England Journal of Medicine study reporting the vaccine’s early trial results.

Nurses administered that vaccine millions of times: drawing up doses, running mass vaccination clinics, answering questions, holding hands. In March 2021, Parton received her own first dose at Vanderbilt, singing a reworked “Jolene” (“vaccine, vaccine”) and urging others to get the shot.

Nurses have been getting ready for shifts to “9 to 5” for decades, a workday anthem blasted by a profession that mostly works 12s. Within hours of the news, they filled TikTok and Instagram with tributes of their own.

@cassiethemidwife quite literally Dolly was an angel on earth 👱🏻‍♀️❤️‍🩹🥲 #dollyparton #nurse #vaccine #research #moderna ♬ original sound – Cassie | L&D RN | CNM student

@ashleyrlifestyle My Icon dolly🦋. She played a large role with how girly I am today #dollyparton #makeup #girly #nurse #RN ♬ 9 to 5 – Dolly Parton

Parton may not have been a nurse, but nurses feel her impact every day. She gave to research when research needed funding, to a rural hospital when her hometown needed one, and to children’s hospitals because a child she loved got better in one. Healthcare was one thread in a far wider pattern of giving that included wildfire and hurricane relief in East Tennessee and her Imagination Library, which has mailed more than 300 million free books to children.

Her family has asked that, in lieu of flowers, donations go to the Imagination Library.

Somewhere tonight, a nurse in Sevierville is helping deliver a baby in a unit with Dolly’s name on the wall. She would have loved that.

🤔 What did Dolly Parton mean to you as a nurse? Share your thoughts in the comments below.