Susan has worked for Forest View Pediatrics for 7 years as a staff nurse in both direct patient care and in our triage area. She is always ready with a cheerful "good morning" and maintains a positive attitude even during the many changes our clinic has gone through over the past several years: moving to a new location, implementation of an electronic health record, working on recognition as a medical home. She is always very engaged at work, offering feedback at staff meetings and in her work on committees that is helpful and offers a different point of view.

She has traveled around the world and shows support for people with different cultures, religion, or ways of doing things, making her more open to new ideas. She is part of the Patient Centered Medical Home committee and has worked on developing triage workflows to better meet the needs of families and help the nursing staff document telephone calls and communicate with physicians effectively. She participated in care coordination by making calls to patients to assure follow through on follow up lab work or specialty care referrals.

She is one of the first to volunteer for projects at work to help with the efficiency of the workplace and assure quality patient care. She is consistently able to understand systems and processes at work and offer constructive feedback for improvements. One specific example of her care is a telephone interaction with a patient's mother who wanted to take her baby off an apnea monitor earlier than the physician recommended. The mother was angry on the phone and expressed frustration with having to work with the equipment and the extra care it required. Susan patiently spent extra time clarifying the mother's concerns, communicating with the physician and explaining the rationale for the monitoring to the mother and the goals for the intervention and expected end date. At the end of the conversation, the mother was able to express her agreement to continue the monitoring with the doctor checking in regularly to address concerns.

I believe this is just a small example of Susan demonstrating the values of Children's Hospital of Wisconsin by focusing on providing the best care, collaborating with other health care professionals to meet the family's needs, and being innovative by helping to develop a personalized plan of care for this patient.