Brandi, a staff nurse in the Cardiovascular Care Unit, joined Providence Medical Center in 2007 as a new graduate nurse. Even in those early days her dedication to demonstrating clinical excellence was surpassed only by her dedication to ensuring a compassionate, caring experience for each patient and their family. Throughout each shift Brandi is a reminder to each co-worker of our faith-based tradition and its impact on the care of our patients. As one co-worker described her, “Brandi is strongly grounded in her faith, she views nursing as her ministry.” That vision was reflected in the two nominations Brandi received for the DAISY Award, one from a patient and one from a co-worker (outside of nursing).
In their nominations they described Brandi’s warm and compassionate nature and her constant responsiveness to need. Her co-worker wrote: “Brandi is someone I look forward to seeing because I know I’ll be greeted with a smile no matter how busy she is. Even though I don’t work in her department, she always asks me if she can help me.”
Her patient wrote: “She encourages, she teaches with great patience, sharing the best way she has learned so I could do them for myself when I went home. She didn’t just show good nursing skill, she showed she cared that I knew what she was doing and why and that she cared how I felt about all the tests and pokes and prodes.” The patient closed her nomination with “I thank God that I had the privilege of having Brandi has my nurse”.
Each of us at Providence Medical Center is also thankful to work with this an extraordinary nurse, Brandi Erikson.