Dr. Sally Gillam started her nursing career in 1980 at Texas Health Harris Methodist Fort Worth as a staff nurse in neurotrauma, following in her mother's footsteps. She progressed in her career to NM acute hemodialysis/apheresis April 1984 to July 1985 and then became Clinical Coordinator, followed by interim director of critical care 1987.
In July of 1987, she moved to Austin Texas and initially started work at St. David's Medical Center as Director of Critical Care.
In 1989 she was promoted to Chief Nursing Officer of South Austin Medical Center. Sally has been at South Austin Medical Center through many many changes. She has been instrumental in taking the hospital from a small community hospital to a large Level II trauma center with a high volume Women's Center and a rapidly growing Bone Marrow Transplant Center.
Sally is the most tenured CNO in the HCA healthcare system, having spent 30 years at South Austin through many growths and developmental changes. It is unusual for a CNO to stay in one location for such a period of time, more often the path is to move from a small to a larger hospital, however, South Austin Medical Center did the growing from a small community hospital to a 360-bed acute care facility.
Sally is a change agent and has always embraced the growth at SAMC. She is a passionate and traditional nurse, loving nothing more than celebrating the nursing team with wear white day during Nurses Week. Sally has mentored many nurses in their leadership journey and successfully transitions several into CNO positions.
Sally returned to school and graduated with her Doctorate of Nursing Practice in 2014.
Her doctoral capstone project was focused on nursing and violence in the workplace. Ever vigilant over her nursing team, Sally studied the effects of violence against staff in the ED and completed a landmark qualitative study on the effects of CPI on violent events, measured using Code Purple. Sally was able to demonstrate through her study that CPI reduced the number of violent events in the ED setting. Following this study, she was invited to speak at international conferences on ways to keep the workplace a safer environment. This was, however, only the first of five papers to be published. Sally graduated as a DNO and continued to focus on evidenced-based practices releasing articles on medication side effect education (mug shots), reverse nurse leader rounding, and soon to be released gamification of discharging patients. Sally has a unique approach to EBP and has demonstrated an ability to engage the frontline staff in this process.
Sally has contributed so much to the nursing profession that it would take days to give the appropriate credit. As she retires from her position of CNO for 30 years at South Austin Medical Center it is appropriate to award her the DAISY Lifetime Achievement Award. She has indeed dedicated her life to the professionalism of nursing and to the patients and families in the community she serves.