Professional Nursing Awards Honor Outstanding UAMS Nurses
| The UAMS Center for Nursing Excellence held its ninth annual Professional Nursing Awards on May 12. The ceremony was available for viewing on Zoom and Facebook Live.
The inaugural Excellence in Advanced Practice Award was presented to Deonna Wissler, APRN, who plays a key
Deonna Wissler, right, on May 12 receives the inaugural Excellence in Advanced Practice Award from Trenda Ray, UAMS chief nursing officer.
role in UAMS maintaining its Comprehensive Stroke certification through the Joint Commission. As a stroke APRN, Wissler is often involved in emergency situations and is well-known for making each code a learning experience for the entire team. This award is presented to an advanced practice nurse who excels in the UAMS Health core values and demonstrates admirable character, selfless dedication, continued leadership and outstanding advocacy for the profession of advanced practice nursing.
Kayla Harrington, MSN, RNC-NIC, was named the winner of this year’s Advancement of Nursing Practice Award. This award recognizes outstanding accomplishment in a field of practice, education or research and demonstrates the interdependence of these elements and their significance for the improvement of nursing and health care. Harrington was nominated for her work on an evidence-based practice initiative focused on routine monitoring of gastric residuals in newborn babies. The project resulted in a simplified process for bedside nurses checking gastric tube placement in babies in the neonatal intensive care unit. The expected outcome for patients will be fewer days to reach full feeds and shorter NICU stays. Her abstract was also accepted to the 2021 Arkansas Nursing Research day as an e-poster.
The Excellence in Nursing Education Award recognizes the work of outstanding nurses who show exceptional skill, innovation and effectiveness in promoting education for nurses. This year’s winner was Tim Vandiver, BSN, RN, outreach nurse in the Institute for Digital Health & Innovation Stroke Program. Vandiver currently serves as the lead subject matter expert for the stroke program, as well as several state-level committees, and is routinely consulted by the Arkansas Department of Health Stroke Division and stroke programs in surrounding states on best practices of pre-hospital care of stroke patients. He was instrumental in the development of a statewide “code stroke” protocol and the adoption of a concise, efficient assessment tool (the BE FAST exam).
Renee Joiner stands after it is announced she has been named as this year’s recipient of the Betty Casali Transformational Leadership Award. Her image appears on the monitor behind her.
The Outstanding Community Service Award, which recognizes the contributions of an individual nurse, professionally or voluntarily, for continuous service activities performed based on the needs of the community, was presented to Richard Ekborg, ADN, RN. He is a veteran and has been involved in multiple projects with the Little Rock Air Force Base, including serving food to airman at the dining facility, coordinating the pickup and delivery of food for 60 airman working the base’s COVID-19 vaccine clinic and clearing sidewalks at the base medical clinic of snow and ice in February.
Renee Joiner, RN, BSN, was honored as this year’s recipient of the Betty Casali Transformational Leadership Award, which honors specific qualities that resulted in empowering/encouraging others to achieve a positive outcome. Under Joiner’s leadership, the UAMS stroke team has equipped ambulances with digital health equipment in two Arkansas locations and partners with 56 hospitals in Arkansas. The UAMS Stroke Program has played an integral part in lowering Arkansas’ national ranking for stroke mortality from first in the nation in 2011 to No. 13 currently.
Also honored at the ceremony were two nurses who died in the past year. Jean Meryl Greenslade, 90, passed away Sept. 30, 2020, in Maumelle. She served as director of nursing at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston from 1975 to 1995 and at UAMS from 1995 to 1999. Yvonne Brown, 64, passed away Jan. 21, 2021. She was employed UAMS as an LPN at the Psychiatric Institute.