Dorothy is officially one of our lead nurses and stepped into a nursing leadership role as ‘charge nurse’ for the hospital-based clinic in Montefiore at a time when we had a severe leadership vacuum. The practice is a large general internal medicine practice with 2500 to 3000 patient visits a month and up to about 20 providers seeing patients on any given day. Over the last year and a half, our clinic has been faced with severe challenges, and she stepped up to provide leadership and consistency during this time.

Early this year, we lost both our practice manager and our ‘charge nurses,’ on top of a depleted workforce, where we had vacant MA and nurse positions. She became the de facto leader – she was always there to answer questions, make the daily pod schedules assigning MAs and doctors to exam rooms, trained new nurses, and trained our two Pitt undergraduate students who worked for us as MAs this summer. She worked to ensure that the MA workload was as balanced as possible. At a time when our doctors sometimes had to room their own patients without the help of an MA, she was the person we could count on to help when there were questions or issues to ensure patients would get the care they need, helping with dressing changes, and supply issues.

One of the faculty doctors said “She never missed a beat in making sure that the clinic was running smoothly despite being so short-staffed. She took the initiative to be a team player and help out wherever she could, including being an MA if needed.” When the staffing shortage created a backlog in completing prior authorizations for medications, she took charge to make sure they were done in a timely manner coming in on weekends to catch up and get them done.

Finally, even before she had to step into the “charge nurse’ role, she was always ready to accept new challenges and initiatives to improve patient care. She was instrumental in a QI project to increase the number of diabetic patients getting their required annual exams by working with the faculty to improve the effectiveness of the use of our retinal camera by developing a protocol to use dilating eye drops. She was instrumental in training staff and collecting data. In addition, she is always advocating for the staff, pointing out to the medical director and director of operations (or practice manager once we had one) when the workload was untenable for the workforce we had and working collaboratively to develop solutions to make the workload manageable and safe.

Our new Practice Manager sums up her qualifications for this award in the following way: “Dorothy has been instrumental in the daily operations of the clinic -- she has stepped up when not even asked to and has continued to do so while dealing with several transitions. She remains a steadfast leader for our team and has been an amazing resource to me coming into our division as well. She has managed to do this all while juggling her personal life and the complicated medical needs of her wife. She never lets life get her down, spends countless hours caring for her wife, and still manages to make sure all of our patient and staff needs are taken care of.” For these reasons, we believe Dorothy is a true DAISY Nurse Leader.