Elicia has been a nurse at Children's Mercy for almost 20 years, and in her time here she has made an incredible impact on, not only the countless number of kids she's taken care of, but also the staff on 4 Sutherland that gets to work alongside her day in and day out. Elicia is knowledgeable, compassionate, dedicated, and an expert at advocating for her patients. When I see I am working with Elicia, I instantly feel a sigh of relief knowing I can rely on her for practically anything and she will be there - for me and for my patients.

I was recently caring for a total care patient admitted for feeding tube issues and difficulty breathing. As I was doing the admission with the provider, Elicia was helping me settle the patient by taking his admission vitals, organizing his room, suctioning, cleaning him up and gathering a multitude of supplies that would be necessary for caring for this patient. Elicia did all of this without anyone asking. After finally getting this kiddo settled, I got another admission and was pulled into that room, leaving Elicia to the pod by herself with the rest of the patients. Thankfully, her kids were behaving, but my poor kiddo decided to throw everyone for a loop! Elicia noticed frank blood in my patient's GT extension, along with a large amount of blood in the diaper that was collecting the rest of the gastric drainage. She knew enough about this kid in helping me on admission to know that this was an acute change, so she quickly paged the provider and asked them to come to the bedside urgently. Once the provider assessed the patient, she put in a slew of new orders to complete - labs, blood cultures, PRN meds, the whole nine - and almost all of it was done by the time I was finally able to come back into the patient's room. I remember I walked in and saw Elicia gloved up in the middle of doing sterile blood cultures and asked, "Elicia! What's happening!?" and she said, "I'm getting your blood cultures, we already sent your other labs, your bolus is going over here, and then your new bag of fluids is ready to go after the bolus with the IV Tylenol already connected and ready you just have to push start."

I was speechless. Elicia had absolutely no responsibility to this patient, but she stepped in and took care of him like he was her own, no questions asked, and did so while also managing her other three kids. It is an enormous challenge for any nurse to give that much time and attention to a patient – particularly one that isn't assigned to them, but that is the kind of nurse that Elicia Payne is; she is dedicated to exceptional patient care, and nothing will get in her way and prevent her from providing anything but the best. Elicia is invaluable to 4 Sutherland, and I feel so lucky to work with and learn from such an outstanding nurse.