This Cookie Thursday is a Thing I intended to make impossible carrot cake. To go along with my theme for the month of Inflation baking.
I did not.
This morning was the quarter 1 awards for my hospital.
Normally the shared governance council votes on all of the award nominations in the next month after the quarter’s end. And we hold the celebration near the end of the month. We hold quarter 1 specifically in May. During Nurses week, and Hospital Week.
No, they are not the same week on the calendar. But they are similar, off by one day. Aggravating. But we Nurses can share our week. Sure,
In my head this is the big awards celebration for the year. I know I have it conflated but yes, yes it is.
We celebrate nurses through the Daisy Award, and the Professional Practice Model Award.
But healthcare is not just about the nurses. There are CNAs and techs. The award we have for them is the Rose award.
And the ancillary staff, who are not nurses or nursing related, such as dietary, admins, radiology, environmental and more, deserve their own award. The award is the Sunshine Award because they bring sunshine to our professional lives.
For a treat we had had nominations and winners from all four awards. This has not been the case for several years. The Professional Practice Model award has gone un-nominated before. Not that there are no nurses who embody the nursing theory the hospital follows, but that the nomination form is complex, and the sections to write on are so small, only 4 lines.
Shared governance has been working for years to get the nominations online. And the Daisy ones are kind of online but it is difficult to get people to fill them out.
And then there is the current staffing difficulties of healthcare. I began the awards ceremony today by telling the crowd that there had been 30 nominations for the quarter. And that this was half of the nominations we had had in the past but more on that in a bit. And of the 30 nominations, 14 had to be discarded because they no longer work for the hospital, or even the system. This is almost half.
How many of those nurses would have remained at the hospital if given a bit of encouragement?
I told the council that we were going to start something new.
After I gather all the nominations, and decipher the handwriting, I am going to email the managers monthly that they had a nomination. And the person would be celebrated at the next awards celebration in the month after the end of the quarter. With instructions to tell the person that they are amazing. And the nominators and the council sees them.
I reminded all the people at the celebration, all socially distanced, to nominate, nominate, nominate. All the staff at the hospital deserve to know that they are seen. That someone knows they are doing an amazing job and nominated them for an award.
I hope this helps.
Traditionally, the Daisy celebration always has Cinnabons. The nearest Cinnabon is in the next town over and I picked them up yesterday. When I was told that the only ones available were 6 pack of large ones, I told the counter girls that I wanted 2.
I panicked, and I overbought. One usually feeds the awards ceremony. I am not sure why I said 2 boxes. I brought the remaining box of 6, cut up small, to the OR for Cookie Thursday.
Happy Hospital Week.
Happy Nurses Week.
Dispatches from the Evening Shift 