Catherine Giegerich, DNP, MS, RN, FACHE

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

In 1980, a young woman in Columbus, Ohio finished a business degree and went to work at Mt. Carmel East Hospital. Not a nursing degree. Business. She could have gone anywhere with that. Banking. Insurance. Anything. She went to a hospital instead, and then she spent the next forty-two years in one.

Ten years in, she went back and earned her nursing degree. Ten years after that, at a point in life when most people have stopped adding letters after their name, she earned her bachelor's. Two years later, a master's. And in 2018, while serving as the Chief Nursing Officer of this hospital, she finished a doctorate.

Five degrees. Thirty-eight years from the first to the last. Catherine Giegerich never once decided she was finished learning.

Look at how she got here. Staff nurse in Columbus. Then oncology, sitting with patients through infusion. Then nurse educator. Then nurse liaison at MD Anderson. Then nurse director. Then Houston Methodist, where over nine years she went from running a twenty-four-bed oncology and surgical unit to running seventy-seven operating rooms, seven hundred and fifty employees, and a hundred and thirty-two million-dollar budget.

And in the middle of that, in 2008, Hurricane Ike came at Houston, and Catherine was the hospital's incident commander. When a storm is bearing down on the Texas Medical Center, you find out in a hurry who you actually want in charge. They picked her.

She also, and this is my favorite line on her entire resume, personally negotiated the health care sponsorship agreements for the Houston Symphony, the Houston Ballet, and the Houston Grand Opera. I have read a lot of nursing resumes in my career. That line appears exactly once.

Then in June of 2014, she came to The Woodlands.

I want to be careful with this next part, because a list of designations read out loud can turn into noise. So listen to what is actually on this list.

Magnet redesignation in 2015. Magnet again in 2020. Beacon designation for the Surgical Trauma ICU and the Medical ICU in 2017. Lantern designation for the Emergency Department in 2019. Level II Trauma designation, earned and then earned again. Level III NICU. Comprehensive Stroke. Bariatric. Joint program. CAUTI, CLABSI, pressure injuries, and falls all driven below the national mean. Length of stay pulled to within two percent of expected. RN retention above ninety percent. HCAHPS in the upper quartile five years running. And twice while she was here, this hospital was named Acute Care Hospital of the Year for the entire Memorial Hermann system.

Now here is the one thing I can say that nobody else in this room can say. I have her job.

Every CNO inherits somebody else's decisions. Most of us inherit a mess. I did not. I walked into a Level II Trauma Center with Magnet on the wall, a certified workforce, a leadership bench already in place, and a culture that expected to be excellent before I ever got here.

I did not build that. Catherine built that.

Everything I have done in this role, I have done standing on a foundation somebody else poured, and everyone in this room who works here is doing the same thing, whether they realize it or not. This was a 397-bed hospital when she arrived. We are 465 now. She did not just hold the line. She grew it.

But the designations are not the legacy. This is.

Under Catherine, many of the staff nurses at this hospital earned advanced certification in their specialty. She built the education and research structure that produced a generation of master's prepared nursing leaders, and some of them are sitting in this room right now running units.

And she did not just tell nurses to go back to school. She went herself. She earned her doctorate while she was our CNO, and then took a position as Associate Dean for Academic Partnerships at the UT Cizik School of Nursing, because apparently running the nursing division of an entire hospital left too much free time on the calendar.

That is not a leader who told nurses to grow. That is a leader who showed them how, and then held the door open behind her.

And then 2020 happened.

Every leader in healthcare has a COVID story. Hers is not the one you would expect.

Catherine was not the person taking an assignment on a unit. She was the Chief Nursing Officer, and she took a seat on the Memorial Hermann system Workforce Committee as the voice for clinical nurses. Not for this campus. For the whole system.

Think about what nurses were actually up against that year, and I do not mean the virus. No childcare, because the schools had closed. Spouses out of work. Elective surgeries cancelled, which meant some nurses were watching their own income disappear in the middle of a pandemic. Groceries you could not find.

So while the rest of the country was making posters about heroes, Catherine went to the table and argued for the unglamorous things. Extra pay for the nurses, the respiratory therapists, and the PCTs picking up surge shifts. Childcare coverage. Tutoring for kids stuck learning at home. And in September of 2020, a mental health benefit for every employee in the system, paid for by the system.

That is what advocacy looks like when it is real. It is not a statement. It is a line item.

She kept Schwartz Rounds running through the worst of it, and during Nurses Week in 2021 she hosted one called Defining Joy at Work. Hosting a session with that title in May of 2021 took some nerve.

And then there is the one I cannot get past.

In 2020, the universities canceled their graduation ceremonies. A number of our people had just finished degrees, some of them nursing degrees, and there was nothing to show for it and nobody there to clap.

So Catherine bought graduation gowns. She had diplomas made. And she put on a commencement ceremony, socially distanced, in the middle of a pandemic, so that the people who had worked for those degrees got to walk across a stage and hear their own names called out loud.

Nobody required her to do that. It was not on a dashboard. It did not move a single metric. She did it because she knew exactly what those degrees cost, having earned four of her own while working full time, and she was not going to let that moment go by unmarked.

That is the whole woman, right there in one story.

And it never stopped at the hospital door. Yes to Youth. San Jose Clinic. Interfaith Community Clinic. Montgomery County Meals on Wheels. Board seats and volunteer hours, for years, in the same community she was serving all day at work.

Catherine retired on July 3rd of 2022. Four years ago. She has earned every single day of it.

We called her back today, and I want to be honest about why. A Lifetime Achievement Award ought to be handed to someone while the people who lived that lifetime alongside her are still in the room to watch it happen.

A lot of you are still here. You worked for her. Some of you were hired by her, or promoted by her, or talked into going back to school by her. None of that goes on a resume, and none of it retires.

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.

Catherine, from a staff nurse in Columbus, Ohio, to the Chief Nurse of this hospital, that is what you gave people. Directly, at the bedside, for the first half of your career. And then through a thousand nurses you built for the second half.

Thank you for the hospital you handed me. Thank you for the nurses you left in it.

Now go enjoy those grandchildren, and remember that you have left a lasting legacy here at Memorial Hermann The Woodlands Medical Center, and we are all grateful for your contributions.