Earlier this week Jimmy Kimmel featured a montage of newscasters and meteorologists expressing their dismay that we’ve reached May already. I’m with Todd Yakoubian – I can’t believe it either.
Yet, here we are, and the 203rd anniversary of Florence Nightingale’s birthday is one week from today. Which means we will be celebrating Nurses Week at UAMS next week. Click here for all the activities planned by our amazing Nurses Rock committee.
This committee selected “UAMS Nurses AR the Future” as the theme for this year’s celebration. They asked UAMS nurses across the state to complete this sentence: “UAMS Nurses AR the Future, because I am __________.” The most popular word submitted was “compassionate.”
We see repeatedly through patient comments that this compassion is felt and appreciated by our patients. I had the privilege of witnessing it first-hand recently when Chief Administrative Officer and Associate Vice Chancellor for Clinical Finance and Clinical Strategy Harrison Reed and I were doing leadership rounds on F4. We were visiting a patient, and he began the conversation by talking for more than 10 minutes about the incredible care he had received. Only after he made sure we knew how wonderful our team is, sharing names with CSM Leah Cruthis, and telling her that she had hired the right people, did he talk about the accident he had been in and the loss of a loved one.
“People need to know they’re doing a good job,” this patient said. “Even on days when they don’t hear that they’re doing a good job, they need to know the impact they are making on peoples’ lives.”
Please hear me – you are doing an amazing job, and your patients, colleagues and UAMS all appreciate your efforts more than you know.
Nurses Week will begin with a welcome to work Monday morning and officially kick off at 11 a.m. with a short event and Blessing of the Hands in the Lobby Gallery. I hope you will take the opportunity to participate in as many events as your schedule allows.
Susan Erickson and our planning committee have once again done an outstanding job of developing fun, creative and inexpensive ways to celebrate nurses across UAMS.
I hope to see many of you next week to thank you in person.
Happy Nurses Week!
Trenda