I served as a volunteer registered nurse to assist with COVID 19 vaccinations, under Nurse Angela Grant’s guidance. Ms. Grant trained over 40 nurses who volunteered to work in the VA COVID 19 vaccination clinic between February and March. Ms. Grant demonstrated excellence in educating staff members on properly filling out documentation, e.g., encounter form, to reduce the number of open encounters in the vaccination clinic and ensure proper documentation for vaccination administration occurred. Several of the staff working in the COVID clinic worked in inpatient units or in administrative roles and had no previous experience completing this documentation requirement.

Calm under pressure, she has been able to work fast and efficiently to make sure nursing staff had everything they needed to administer vaccinations and gave Veterans timely updates on the status of the clinic. She never loses her temper with questions or complaints from Veterans about the wait time. Working in a fast-paced environment with rotating staff each shift is hard for any manager, but Ms. Grant can manage all the different staff without an effect on clinic operations. The COVID clinic administers anywhere from 800 to 1,000 vaccinations each day. During a COVID vaccination drive-thru event, there can be anywhere from 1,000 to 3,000 Veterans scheduled.

Ms. Grant displays the highest level of integrity, tenacity, drive, and intelligence that has helped her to improve program operations for the COVID Vaccination clinic. She has developed processes that improve the efficiency of the clinic. For example, she makes sure all new staff working in COVID clinic are properly trained on how to work in the clinic. She explains changes in policy with staff to make sure all are aware. With the new SAVES act, she helped staff understand the new changes for how to document the vaccination for the spouses and caregivers.

She is a good steward of resource utilization for COVID 19 vaccines. She makes sure staff are not improperly handling vaccines by placing vaccines into computer on wheels (COWS). She keeps accurate vaccine counts of vaccines given to each staff member. She ensures that staff understand the importance of only getting vaccines for the total number of patients in your area and if a vaccine is not needed that staff knows to give the vaccine to another nurse if a patient is waiting. Her leadership has helped the clinic have a low number of wasted vaccines doses each night.

Ms. Grant serves as patient advocate when an issue occurs. For example, there was a Veteran who came to the COVID clinic for their 2nd dose vaccine who had previously received Pfizer first dose. Ms. Grant explained to the patient that she would need to speak with a medical doctor to get guidance on the patient receiving the vaccine. She explained that CDC guidance did not recommend for vaccines to be switched between 1st and 2nd dose. She explained the rationale to the patient and after much discussion, she was able to get the Veteran to agree to come back to the clinic on the next day to speak with a physician from Infectious Disease about his request. She arranged for the Veteran to get an appointment for the next day and sent information about his request to Infectious Disease provider to make sure they were informed.

I wholeheartedly believe Angela Grant is deserving of this DAISY Nurse Leader Award. She has displayed contributions to further Atlanta VA Health Care System nurses and for the care of Veterans who came to the COVID vaccination clinic. Her leadership has helped the facility to reach the goal of 75% of total veterans receiving VA care that have received a COVID-19 vaccination and 82.1% of employees being vaccinated. She has provided compassionate patient care. Her tenacity to improve others development and improve Veteran health care is beyond recognition.