Mary Lee Fong

We would like to nominate Mary Lee Fong, RN for the DAISY Award. Mary is an Assistant Nurse Manager on Davis 12. In her role as charge nurse, she is responsible for a variety of things including patient safety, patient-flow, and cost-containment, rarely direct patient care. However over the past 115 days Mary has volunteered to be an Associate Nurse of a very challenging patient with multiple physical, psychological and emotional problems. As an Associate Nurse, Mary was a face of familiarity and a voice of honesty. With time and fortitude, Mary established a therapeutic relationship with the patient and family by communicating honestly and coordinating care conferences to meet the patient's needs. Mary challenged herself to confront her fear of conflict and faced obstacles with virtue and determination. Mary role-modeled effective communication, conflict resolution, and courage to her staff nurses. She demonstrated the effectiveness of primary nursing to her staff despite her own internal struggle with dealing with an angry, self-destructive patient because she took solace in the fact that his anger was merely and outlet for underlying fear. Today Mary reminded all of us of the importance of humanity in nursing.