Alison Kutsal, MBA, BSN, RN, NE-BC

Remarks by John Voight, DNP, RN, NEA-BC, Vice President and Chief Nursing Officer

In 1980, a young woman walked into her local nursing school in England and told them she would like to be a nurse. No agonizing over the application. No years of deliberation. She walked in the door and said what she wanted.

She had already been out on her own for about four years by then. She left home around sixteen and went to work. So by the time she showed up at that school, she had already learned something most people take a lot longer to figure out, which is that if you want something, you go ask for it.

Forty-six years later, that woman is our Director of Neurosciences, IMU, and MICU.

Here is the part I like best. Every other student in that program lived on campus. Alison lived off campus, on her own, in a stone cottage. Day one of a forty-six-year career, and she had already decided that the way everybody else did it was not necessarily the way she was going to do it.

If you have ever worked for Alison, you recognized her in that story immediately.

She started in oncology, and oncology stayed with her for the rest of her career. But she has covered nearly every specialty there is. Medical. Surgical. Orthopedics. Neuro. Trauma. Cardiac. Rehab. Dialysis. Stroke. Critical care. There is not much in this building she has not either done or run.

In England, she was a Sister. For those of us who trained in the States, that title does not translate cleanly. A Sister runs the ward. But the word carries something ours does not. In England, Sister is a title of respect, and you earn it. Alison earned it before most of us in this room had a license.

And then she got on a plane.

New York City. Iowa, where she will tell you she loved looking out the window at all that corn. Indiana. Then Texas for the first time, as a Director of Nursing at Shoreline in Corpus Christi, where she found the coast and a beach she still misses. Then New Mexico. And then here.

Read that history the way a nurse reads it, and the same thing keeps showing up.

She saw breast cancer patients getting lost between appointments, between departments, between specialists, and there was no job for the person who walks with them through it. So she wrote the job description for a breast cancer navigator. Then she did the job herself.

In Corpus Christi, she found oncology patients sitting for hours in an emergency department waiting on a blood transfusion. So she opened an outpatient unit and got them out of the ED.

On her oncology unit, she put the primary nurse, the case manager, and the chaplain at the bedside together, in front of the patient. Not in a conference room down the hall.

Those are not administrative decisions. Those are nursing decisions, made by somebody who never stopped seeing the patient.

Then COVID hit.

I do not need to explain that to this room. You were there. You lived it, and a lot of you have never really talked about it since.

But let us say it out loud for a minute. You came to work not knowing what you were walking into. The guidance changed every day and some days twice a day. There was never enough staff, never enough beds, never enough of anything. Your coworkers were out sick, and you picked up their patients on top of your own. You watched people die without their families in the room, and you were the one holding the phone so a daughter could say goodbye to her father through a screen. Then you went home and worried about what you were bringing home with you.

Nobody trained us for that. There was no policy for it. There was no chapter on it in anybody's textbook.

What held teams together in those months was not a plan, and it was not a command center. It came down to a simpler question. Did your leader show up, or did your leader disappear?

Alison showed up. She was responsible for multiple units, and she covered them as the director, as the manager, and as the charge nurse. All three jobs at once, because there was nobody else left to do them and she was not going to leave a unit uncovered. She did not ask a single nurse to do one thing she was not doing herself that same week.

That is what leadership actually looked like in 2020. Not a memo. Not a message of support sent from somewhere else in the building. A director standing in the middle of it, taking an assignment, so that every nurse on that unit knew somebody was in it with them.

Nurses remember who was on the unit. Alison was on the unit. Alison also has a line she says often enough that her team can finish it for her. "Trust but validate."

That is not suspicion, and it is not micromanagement. What she is saying is that caring about your people and checking the work are the same job. You do not get to skip the second half because you like somebody. Patients are safe because leaders go look. Every nurse who has worked for her has heard that line, and a lot of them are saying it now to their own teams, which is exactly how a career outlives the person who had it.

She also does not take no very well. I say that with complete admiration. Tell Alison something cannot be done, and she will go find the way it can be. Forty-six years of that is why inpatient dialysis got insourced, why four new units got built, and why she went and finished an MBA while running six units through a pandemic.
Now, my favorite thing about her being here.

She chose this. Alison will tell you she was intentional about it. She wanted to be back in Texas with DJ and closer to Melody. She wanted to be at Memorial Hermann The Woodlands specifically. And when the Neuroscience director position opened, she looked at it and said that one is mine.

And then she got here and went to work.

I want to be specific about this part, because the people in this room lived it. Neurosciences, IMU, and MICU are not the same units they were before Alison walked into them. The performance changed. The stability changed. The way those teams carry themselves changed. That did not happen because somebody wrote a plan. It happened because a director showed up every single day and did the unglamorous work of building it, one nurse and one conversation at a time.
A lot of it came down to the physicians. Alison understood early that you cannot build a Neuroscience program from the nursing side alone. So she built real partnerships with our physicians. She sat in the hard conversations instead of avoiding them. She got nursing and medicine working the same problem together rather than around each other.

Then look at what came out of it. We went through our DNV stroke survey and came out with zero deficiencies. Zero. Everybody in this room who has lived through a survey knows exactly what that costs and exactly how rare that is. And Dr. Sabih Effendi, our Stroke Medical Director, did not keep any of that credit for himself. He handed it straight to the team and to Alison's leadership of it. When your Stroke Medical Director says that out loud, believe him.

That respect runs in every direction. Physicians. APPs. Our leadership team. And the one that counts the most, the front-line nurses on those units. They will tell you exactly what she is, and they are right.

Now here is the part I care about most, because it is the part that stays.

Jennifer Cox came up under Alison as Manager of Neuroscience. She was just promoted to Director of SICU and Trauma Med-Surg. Letrida Rhyans came up as our Stroke Coordinator. She was just promoted to Manager of the Neuroscience ICU. Megan Clifton came up under her as an assistant nurse manager. She was just promoted to Manager of the Neuro Spine Unit.

Three leaders. On her watch. In her shop. That is not luck, and it is not a coincidence of timing. That is a director who spent her time on her people instead of on herself.

Jennifer, Letrida, Megan, everything she gave you now belongs to your teams. That is how this is supposed to work.

Alison is a nurse's nurse. To the core. Forty-six years in and she still thinks like the person standing at the bedside, because that is where she started and she never actually left.

Of all the places forty-six years could have taken her, she picked us on purpose. I do not take that lightly.

Which brings me to the other reason we are all standing here.

On October 23, Alison retires. Forty-six years of nursing end that day.

Most people get a Lifetime Achievement Award somewhere in the middle of things, with plenty of career still ahead of them. Alison is getting hers at the actual end of it. That is rare, and it means the words on this award are literally true. This is the achievement of a lifetime, and today we get to look at the whole thing at once.

The DAISY Foundation created this award because a family watched nurses take care of their son, and what stayed with them was not the clinical skill. It was the kindness.

Alison, since 1980, on two continents and across five states, that is what you have given people. Patients. Families. And a lot of nurses who are better at this work because of you.

Now here is what I want the rest of you to hear. On October 23, she walks out that door with forty-six years of nursing judgment, and the only part of it that stays in this hospital is the part she has already put into you. So you have until October 23. Go find her. Ask her the thing you have been meaning to ask. She will tell you. Alison has never once been shy about telling anybody anything.

And keep saying trust but validate. That one is hers. She is leaving it with us.

Alison, congratulations. Thank you for choosing us for the last chapter of this. Now go take Vera for a walk on a beach somewhere. You have earned every step of it.