Since the opening of our new City of Hope location in Irvine last year, Nicol has been creative in the ways she has cultivated team camaraderie among all new staff members. One of her ideas that has become a staff favorite, which is called the “Circle of Awesome.” This is where we pick one day every few weeks for our team to meet on our unit, one hour prior to opening that day. Nicol will pose one or two thought-provoking questions that everyone will answer if they wish to participate. We position our chairs in a large circle, and one person speaks at a time to ensure everyone shares thoughts/feelings/ideas without being interrupted. This is achieved by passing around an object, and whoever is holding the object is the only person allowed to speak. After they are finished speaking, they then pass the object to the next person, and so on. Our Circle of Awesome has allowed our team to build deeper connections with each other by hearing what our peers are experiencing. We spend so many hours working on the unit together during our very busy outpatient schedules, and this group activity gives us time to share our personal victories, struggles, and everything in between. We laugh and cry together during our Circle of Awesome, which has built trust, compassion, and mutual respect among our team. We are always asking when our next Circle of Awesome will be!

Nicol herself demonstrates continued professional development by being an example that keeps us all in awe. Her level of knowledge and expertise that she shares with us, including her thought processes, leads us all to use evidence-based practice daily as we provide safe patient care. She also encourages us to continue learning and has provided individual guidance to each nurse on our goals, both short-term and long-term. Several of our nurses are starting Masters level programs, some are in Doctoral programs, while others are studying for their Oncology Certified Nurse exams, all due to the encouragement from Nicol. We are also transitioning from being mainly standard-of-care infusion nurses to embracing research nursing and training for that role. All our infusion nurses are currently in the process of rotating through learning new roles, such as charge nurse, chemo education nurse, and day hospital nurse, as we prepare to open a new wing at our infusion and research center. Since our opening, Nicol has shared her vision with us being that each nurse will eventually be trained in all nursing areas that our infusion and clinical research center has to offer, that way, we will all understand how our system functions and confidently grow our skillset.  She empowers nurses to work at the top of their licensure by providing resources and evidence from nursing journals that are applicable to our daily nursing practice. We often receive emails and information in our Teams daily Huddle post that include studies and journal articles filled with evidence-based practice and ethical topics. Reading and discussing these as a team has helped us shape our nursing culture of practicing with safety and integrity within COH policy, while also improving and creating new workflows for our team.

Nicol acknowledges each member of our department in the infusion clinic as a vital member of the team, and she demonstrates this through her caring leadership style and supporting us in developing our own individual strengths, which in turn help to create, maintain, and sustain the environment that nurtures compassionate patient care that we can truly say that we built together. Nicol presents challenges to the team to constantly improve and not settle for being mediocre. Through her positive attitude, ability to listen to the employees' feedback, and acknowledgment of our capability of greatness, we have achieved improved patient outcomes as a team.