Michelle became the educator for Sinai’s intensive care unit at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. She came from a different hospital, at the last minute, to help our unit during a very vulnerable point. Pre-pandemic we were a small 12-bed intensive care unit requiring just a few staff nurses each day to run. Our unit doubled in size and was seeing three times the amount of patients at a higher level of acuity than any of us had ever seen.

Michelle stepped up to the plate and very quickly became an asset to our unit by providing education to the nurses and nursing assistants day in and day out. Every day she would show up in scrubs ready to teach and ready to assist the nurses in providing bedside care. There were numerous occasions she would be in full PPE assisting me to turn and clean up my patients. Although she was the educator, no bedside task was above her. She was able to train our nurses on various skills we had never done before such as proning patients, pulmonary artery catheters, and advanced hemodynamics.

She always met our challenges with compassion and patience, making herself easy to find and comfortable to approach with any issue. Last year we lost numerous educators throughout the hospital. Michelle then took on the role of educator for not only the ICU, but many Medical/Surgical units as well. Despite such a large workload on her plate Michelle managed to implement many different unit and hospital improvements. One of these being a comprehensive skills fair for new and existing nurses and nursing assistants throughout the hospital. She surveyed the units and developed a skills day learning plan that would fit the needs of the hospital as a whole. Today, we host an 8 hours skills fair each month with positive feedback after each session.

In the ICU she surveyed our nurses and studied our incident reporting system to create unit-specific learning topics each month. She would collaborate with various echelons in the hospital to create bulletin boards, presentations, and hands-on demonstrations for each learning topic. As an example, February was pressure injury prevention and Michelle was able to coordinate with the wound care team and the alleyvn representatives to teach our nurses about various pressure injury prevention strategies. Our incidence of pressure injuries showed a decline after the education she facilitated that month.

Overall, I believe Michelle is a DAISY Nurse because she has proven time and time again that she deserves it. I have been practicing at this intensive care unit for about four years and I full-heartedly know that I would not be the critical care nurse that I am today without her assistance.

Note: This is Michelle's 2nd DAISY Award!