I am both honored and grateful for the opportunity to nominate my manager, Rachelle Collins, for the DAISY Nurse Leader Award. I have been fortunate to work with Rachelle for the last five years. She has been a mentor, a leader, and a cherished friend to me since she joined our Med Surg team. Due to Rachelle’s exceptional leadership skills, she has quickly advanced from a night shift CNC to our department manager. Rachelle’s exceptional skills have helped us nurture and grow a department culture that embodies our organizational values and goals of compassion, service, safety, and excellence. She has been a trusted and compassionate leader through some of the most challenging experiences in our hospital history, including COVID, the Marshall fire, the disaffiliation, and the shifting demographic and acuity of our patient population that has at times changed how we need to keep ourselves safe and protected in a changing healthcare environment.

I think Rachelle’s exceptional leadership skills are on display and evident to all who interact with her. She is an excellent listener, problem-solver, and communicator. She is curious, she is open to feedback and process improvement suggestions, and empowers her team to be part of the solution. She juggles the many ever-changing factors that influence and affect our department’s productivity, staffing needs, and resources with grace and good humor. She has helped us build and grow a team of exceptional nurses who are committed to excellent patient care and safety but who also genuinely like one another, work well as a team, and love our hospital. She has nurtured a number of nurse residents who have also achieved the status of DAISY Award Honorees, giving them a place to learn and grow an exceptional nursing practice. She is a tireless advocate for our team and for our hospital. She inspires people to do the right thing and work hard and nudges everyone to take care of themselves. She is genuinely committed to ensuring that our team feels respected, protected, and listened to.

I think that our recent DNV survey was a testament to the team that we have built and grown over the last five years and the recognition by our surveyor about what a hardworking and dedicated team we have on our unit. Certainly, it reflects how Rachelle has been able to help encourage everyone on our team to take pride in their jobs and our patient care goals and to recognize and reward staff for their hard work. It’s the little things – saying thank you, sending out recognition emails, remembering to catch people doing the right thing – all of those moments add up and build a reservoir of good feelings and faith in a manager so that when there is an opportunity to improve, it doesn’t feel punitive.

I also think the care and time she took to really understand our Glint scores and the “why” behind the opportunities is a testament to not just wanting to check a box but to really understand what our team wants and needs from us as department managers, and how to bridge that gap between “AdventHealth” and our department. How to make relevant and meaningful our organizational mission and the many different quality, safety, and performance goals of our hospital and system in a way that helps the team understand why what they do matters…and how to do it safely, effectively, and efficiently. And when those things don’t necessarily match up, be creative about and open to ways to bridge the gap. That’s a rare gift, to be able to work on both a macro and micro level. I also appreciate that she and I can share the load in that regard – when we have different skills and strengths and find a way to share those responsibilities. Another measure of a great leader is to know when to not micromanage and to trust the people that you have empowered to take on a task or role.

While I could expound on all the ways that Rachelle meets and exceeds the measures of what a DAISY Nurse Leader is expected to achieve – for she has met all the suggested bullet points, and her Glint scores bear that out – Rachelle is one of the kindest and most compassionate people I have been blessed to know and lucky to count among my dearest friends. And that isn’t something that’s easy to “measure” when it comes to determining who is deserving of such recognition. But our friendship grew out of mutual trust and respect, and something even more dear to me – she saw something in me, a potential, perhaps, that I could not see in myself…and that has allowed me to grow and push myself as a nurse and into accepting a leadership position in our department that I did not have the self-confidence or faith in myself to believe I was capable of. She has encouraged me to be a better nurse, a better teammate, a better communicator, and a better leader by modeling and teaching me how to be curious rather than make snap judgments or rush to a conclusion. She has taught me and modeled how to be a compassionate but fair manager…to always treat everyone with respect, with honesty, with compassion, and with faith in their goodness. She is funny, achingly so – as evidenced by the way she can make me laugh until I cry or find a reason to smile through the tears. We have been through some very, very challenging experiences together, both personally and professionally…and she has been able to help me walk through some of those experiences and learn something important about myself, about nursing, about how to be a good manager, a good leader, and a good person. That’s a rare combination.

I do not have any doubt that this will be a challenging selection; we have many exceptional leaders in our hospital…it’s one of the reasons I feel blessed to work at Avista and a compelling reason why I continue to make our department and hospital my home away from home. While I have no doubt that all of our leaders are deserving of this recognition in their unique and special ways. But a truly deserving leader is one who can check all the boxes…and Rachelle does that in ways big and small every single day.

Thank you for this opportunity to recognize and honor our exceptional leader and my exceptional friend.