LinkLine's Connie Smith is Lenoir County's ‘answer person'

After talking to Connie Smith for a few minutes, one might be inclined to call her a “know-it-all.”

Relax — it’s a good thing.

Since 2003, Smith has been the “answer person” for LinkLine, a 24-hour service provided by Lenoir Memorial Hospital and partially funded by the Lenoir-Greene United Way. LinkLine offers a telephone resource service staffed by a caring and professional information and referral specialist, which is Smith. She provides individual and non-biased referrals to an extensive network of health and human services programs.

“It’s a free service to anybody from any walk of life,” the affable Smith said. “It could be someone who is very poor and needy needing assistance or someone calling to say they passed a hotel on Ocracoke while on a ferry and they can’t remember the hotel’s name.

“In some ways, we just do everything we can to help people meet their needs.”

Smith has been an employee at Lenoir Memorial Hospital since 1986 in a number of positions, but she said she loves being involved with LinkLine. She estimates that she spends about eight hours a week on LinkLine, answering live calls and returning calls that have been left on the service’s machine.

“I love the LinkLine part of my job,” Smith said. “I enjoy trying to assist and help people; I feel like I’m doing outreach with people in our community. I feel like we serve a big need.”

It’s open enrollment time for Medicare, and Smith said that’s what a big chunk of her calls are about at the moment. But she said she answers questions about virtually any subject a caller asks.

“I help to serve their need with whatever services we have available in the community,” Smith said. “If someone calls me with an aging parent who needs a medical alert program, then I search what is in my database and extend to them all the agencies that offer that service, whether it’s local, state or a national program.”

Financial assistance, teen pregnancy and suicide prevention are other major areas in which LinkLine helps callers.

“If it means helping them through a crisis intervention so that we can help, we match them up with those agencies,” Smith said. “We want to do what we can to help as many people as we can.”

Bryan C. Hanks can be reached at 252-559-1074 or at bhanks@freedomenc.com. Check out Bryan’s blog at bhanks.encblogs.com.