I worked with Kelly for 4 years. She is the most caring, tireless and giving person I have ever met. She listens to her patient's needs, carries through with their needs and is a team member. She is willing to drop everything to help an aide, a patient a fellow nurse or a doctor. She has even gone beyond her shift to finish what she is doing for her patient. I have never met a nurse like her. It always made me happy when I was working with her. She made working the graveyard shift go a lot smoother. Nobody deserves this award more than Kelly. Thank you.
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Kelly Recore is the epitome of a good nurse. I have had the pleasure of working with her off and on for the last four years. She is kind, caring, assiduous, and always exudes the passion for nursing and her patients and their family's that inspires her coworkers. Kelly has this innate ability to connect with even the most difficult, challenging patients and then, in turn, provides them with more comfort than other's struggle to deliver. Amidst the stressors of a 12-hours shift, Kelly consistently, night after night, has a smile on her face bringing pure positivity to our unit. Kelly is so much more than a positive voice, though. She has a skill set that quite frankly saves lives. She is an expert clinician at our facility. Other nurses ask Kelly for advice and second opinions. She is so in tune with her patients that she knows the very moment when there is a deviation from baseline. She is so dedicated to the profession. She is nationally certified in Medical Surgical Nursing. Kelly is currently working towards earning her Bachelors of Science in Nursing while working full time and providing for her family.
While all of these qualities are a part of the expert nurse Kelly is, I think the quality that sets her so far from everyone else is how truly selfless she is. Her patient's, their family and their safety come first. Even on the busiest of nights, Kelly makes the extra bit of time for her patients. She puts documenting aside to just be there for her patients, which is truly one of the most powerful things a nurse can do. One of the first times I encountered this was Mother's Day.
We had such an arduous night. With more admissions than usual and multiple emergent situations on the floor, it really was challenging to provide excellent family-centered care. Kelly was the glue that held us all together. She really rallied us, boosted our morale and led us through a really difficult night. I remember that night she had a challenging post-operative patient. Although she didn't really have it as she had two admissions, she took the extra time to sit with him, literally hold his hand to comfort him, to alleviate his stress, to help him cope with his situation. IV medications and IV antibiotics could not help this 40-something-year-old man cope in the same way Kelly's kindness and compassion did. This was one of the most powerful and warming things I witnessed in my first year of nursing. If that weren't enough, that particular holiday, Kelly had made Mother's Day cards at home, on her time off, to distribute to every mother who had to be away from their family in the hospital. Along these same lines, each Christmas Kelly organizes, shops for and distributes stockings on Christmas Eve to each patient on our floor. She has done this for three years, which in turn means she sacrifices being away from her own family each Christmas Eve to help brighten the hospital experience of our patient's on MSU-2. With Kelly, though, these situations are not few and far between, these aren't infrequent. Kelly always goes above and beyond for patients and their family. A nurse often rates another nurse by how willingly we would let them care for our family members. Kelly can care for any of my family members, any day of the year. In fact she has cared for one of my family members and still, two and a half years later, my grandma remembers the caring, comforting, genuine, compassionate care Kelly provided her. The extra time and amount of comfort Kelly provided my grandma during such a low point in her life, didn't go unnoticed by her nor myself and my family.
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Since I started working on MSU2 three years ago on midnights, Kelly has always been a strong role model for new nurses and employees, even a strong role model for seasoned nurses. Her work ethic is the very definition of the standards nurses should strive for. I've never had the privilege of having a coworker so passionate about their job. Kelly creates such a wonderful healing environment for the patients, assessing every detail and always trying her best to make them feel as comfortable as possible. She goes above and beyond of what's expected as a nurse.
She's the first to arrive for a shift, and sometimes the last to leave after a shift, always willing to help others who are struggling no matter how late it is.
With her medical-surgical skills on point, she takes the time to teach and explain things, as well as being cross-trained in OB, she is a woman of much knowledge. Kelly is the ideal coworker for any nurse. She's ready to assist in any way, and her leadership is motivating. Working as a full-time nurse as well as a busy mom, she is going back to school for her bachelor's. She is an inspiration for me, and she deserves this award.