We strongly recommend our colleague, Sandra Williams, for the Nemours DAISY Nurse Leader of the Year. She is a permanent clinical charge nurse and a leader for her peers. Sandra leads by example and drives her team to provide the safest care for complexly ill children. Sandra has had many responsibilities and the common themes to her performance are timely, thorough, and professional. She is also flexible,
organized, and always ready to seek out new challenges. Sandra has the ability to recognize when her team members need additional support, and she utilizes her resources to provide for that need. One of our favorite qualities of Sandra is that she recognizes that a team is built with both hard work but also recognition. Sandra excels in providing opportunity to recognize the hard work of others and of their
achievements. She is not one to step in the spotlight but rather shines the spotlight on her team. She is often the unsung hero of the day, stepping into patient care, into problem solving or into a challenging patient condition. She is the nurse who senses when a peer needs additional support, when someone missed a much needed lunch break or when someone needs encouraging words. It is hard to find all the words that describe the impact that Sandra has on the 'feel' of a shift but her presence always makes a difference.
Additionally, she spearheads department projects that make measurable changes for our patients. One of Sandra's passions has been early recognition and treatment of pediatric sepsis. The speed of identification and intervention can mean the difference of life and death for an ill child. Sandra spent the entire month of September on sepsis awareness. She arranged for activities, education, sepsis shirts, food that was red in color and many, many little things to put sepsis at the forefront of each associates mind. She has ensured that huddles occur, she audits charts, she engages others and addresses any deficits in real time. She truly put her heart and soul into preparing our associates for any child that may come into our department with signs and symptoms of sepsis. Sandra engages our team with passion, with love and with professionalism. She transforms those around her to embrace the best practices that support quality patient care and best outcomes. She is transformational and she is most definitely, deserving of the DAISY Nurse Leader of the Year award.