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DAISY Award presented to SMCH nurses

LAKE CITY — Delivering compassionate patient care and great clinical skills are the qualities that recently earned two Stewart Memorial Community Hospital nurses the DAISY Award.

The award, which was established in 1999 and stands for Diseases Attacking the Immune System, is in memory of J. Patrick Barnes. Barnes died at age 33 of complications of Idiopathic Thrombocytopenic Purpura or ITP. During his lengthy hospital stay, his family was awestruck by the care and compassion Patrick received from his nurses. The DAISY award was established to say thank you to nurses across the nation by honoring the work they do at the bedside, funding research, and honoring nursing faculty.

Six nurses from SMCH in Lake City and McCrary Rost Clinic were nominated for the award.

Ashley Mork, RN, and Jeremy Johnson, CRNA were presented the award at banquet celebrating the nominees.

Mork joined the Med-Surg team in 2015 as an OB nurse. She currently serves as a nurse educator at the hospital and works in OB. She was nominated by an OB patient who wrote, “She was definitely our advocate and listened to me- which is a HUGE part of being so deserving of the Daisy Award. She made us feel as comfortable as possible in the moment. She never left my side during the labor and that can make or break an experience during that stressful time. She was by my side working (what I felt) just as hard as I was.”

Certified advanced registered nurse anesthetist Jeremy Johnson has been at SMCH since 2016. Johnson’s nomination from an OB patient whose epidural placement did not go as planned said, “The next morning Jeremy tells me he’d been thinking a ton of why it happened, and what the ‘plan’ will be next time. He had all of these reasons as to why he thinks it didn’t work, and also had many ideas if I were to have another c section on what he would do differently next time. Jeremy could have easily just thought ‘well that was hard, darn’ and moved on with his day like normal. But instead he chose to go ‘above and beyond’ by talking with me the next day, and wanting to take extra steps to make sure the next time goes much smoother.”

Other nominees include registered nurses Amanda Johnson, Michelle Thoma, Vanessa Solko, and Jess Heinrichs.

Kari Jones, chief nursing officer at SMCH, said nurses, like the ones nominated at SMCH, are surprised when they receive the DAISY Award.

“Most nurses do not believe they are doing ‘anything special’ and they are just ‘doing their job,” Jones said. “That’s why at every DAISY Award presentation, we ask each nurse to pause for a minute and realize how very special they are and how they make the world a better place by ‘just doing their jobs,'”

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