I would like to make known the extraordinary efforts of Kristin, a dedicated charge nurse who has served the people of Dallas County for over ten years. As a staff leader, she directly feels the impact of many stressful situations in the daily fluctuation of critical care. She contributes to creating the best possible solutions that explicitly demonstrate the integrity, compassion, collaboration, accountability, respect, and equity of our core ICARE values in a way that exceeds every expectation.

Her leadership, for context, is within a unit of approximately 120 RNs that in the last year has onboarded 50 nurses through the Bridge Program residency/fellowship in addition to onboarding experienced RNs from outside organizations. This year, we have reduced our vacancy rate from 27% to 3% or less. This means that many staff have been called on to precept, and charge nurses have spent extra time overseeing the professional development of our many novice nurses. While her practice reflects the highest level of nursing dedication daily, recent events have made it clear that she needs to be celebrated in the highest possible means. She recognized areas for improvement that are common among novice critical care nurses especially in recent practice. As a charge nurse she actively works to help train staff proactively. This includes those nurses still being trained. One learner was struggling to meet expectations, when experienced preceptors had given their best efforts. Kristin agreed to step in, from her charge nurse role into a preceptor role giving special attention, and helping to develop the learner. Without fail, every time the educator checked in on Kristin and her learner, new strategies were being developed, adjustments were being made, and positive coaching was witnessed. The pair was always together, demonstrating the safest effective method of patient care while training. In addition to the immediate feedback given to the learner during the shift, post-shift discussions were detailed with strengths highlighted and areas for improvement expressed in objective detailed ways to build up the learner's nursing practice. The learner demonstrated significant improvement in the areas of time management, shift structure using time tapes, clustering care, and critical thinking. The learner completed an action plan and will move to the next step of their training after significant practice improvement due to Kristin’s ability to adapt teaching styles to build the learner while never compromising patient safety.

The effect of these actions extended beyond this one learner. By setting an unwavering standard and finding ways to equitably bring a learner up to that standard, other preceptors, charge nurses, staff, and learners were given much-needed role modeling of everything that a nurse can be. Just as the strength of each unit is often measured by the actions of individual employees, Kristin lives the personal accountability that if held to by each employee, I truly believe there would be no stronger unit anywhere.