Linda has been a nurse for 42 years. She became an RN in 1980 and worked as a pediatric nurse in Connecticut and San Francisco before coming to CHOP in 1990. From 1990-1997 she served as a nurse in the CHOP NICU. From 1997 until the present day she has been an educator in The Family Learning Center (FLC) at CHOP. The FLC was a cutting-edge concept in 1997. There was only one other such center in the United States at the time and it only served adult patients. We were pioneers!

Linda was one of the first nurses that I hired into the FLC. I had many applicants, but Linda stood out as a star in patient care, patient-family education, staff education, and personal professional development. She received accolades from peers and leaders in all of these areas. Linda has played a critical role in the development of the FLC and patient-family education in general. She partnered with me to develop all of our initial curricula and has helped me to expand our curriculum from an initial list of 5 classes to our current 75 offerings. She developed partnerships with vendors and clinical experts to create our class content and consistently received positive feedback from these partners regarding this work.

As the FLC gained popularity, our volumes increased and we increased our staffing from 2 nurses to 6. Linda created our original orientation program, independently oriented our first few nurses, and continues to participate in both of these activities with enthusiasm. She expanded her staff development expertise into the general nursing orientation program at CHOP, regularly teaching a class on the importance of Patient-Family Education, how to effectively assess/meet learning needs, etc. She frequently provides unit-based in-services to staff to increase their comfort and expertise with bedside teaching.

Linda is very thoughtful about providing the ideal patient experience. She thought that we could better serve our outpatient families by providing classes remotely, through tele-education. When outpatients are prescribed an injectable medication during a clinic visit, they have to go home, wait for their medication to be approved/delivered and then come back to CHOP to learn how to give it. This is inconvenient and stressful for families as they have to plan a trip to the city, miss work/school, incur travel expenses, etc. Linda applied for and received a grant to explore the possibility of doing tele-education for these families. The initiative has been immensely successful. We started off teaching one medication to one specific patient population and we now teach all of our outpatient injectable medications via tele-ed. This program was developed in the year before Covid arrived, which was very timely as it allowed us to serve families who would not have been permitted into the hospital to attend a class due to the infection control precautions at the time. Feedback from patients and families has been extremely positive. Linda is now exploring the possibility of offering some of our other classes via tele-ed.

Linda presented this work at two national conferences, the Health Care Education Association and the Magnet conference. She also published an article about this work in the Magnet journal, American Nurse. She is working with our Gender Clinic to author another article specific to the teaching we do for their transgender youth. Linda has dedicated her professional career to serving patients and families with skill, creativity, and compassion.

I'm honored to have had her as my partner in the Patient-Family Education work for the past 25 years. She is planning to retire in the near future and I would like to be able to honor her with the DAISY Lifetime Achievement Award.