May 2025
Colleen
Keith
,
RN
Martin Luther King Jr Community Healthcare
Los Angeles
,
CA
United States
Colleen serves as the educational liaison for various departments. What I appreciate most about Colleen is her collaborative spirit, working with other departments to ensure their staff have the right education at the right time, delivered in the most effective way.
The DAISY Nurse Educator Award was created to honor every nurse educator for their inspirational influence on the Nurses of today and tomorrow, across the education continuum in academic and practice settings. In healthcare organizations, like MLK, clinical educators ensure that students, new graduates, and nurses transitioning into specialty practice are competent and confident in their skills. These educators also keep clinicians updated on evidence-based practice and provide professional development opportunities that promote lifelong learning.
I would like to nominate Colleen Keith for the DAISY Nurse Educator Award. It is not one specific act, but a series of consistent examples that make her deserving of this award.
Colleen demonstrates excellence in teaching through her classroom facilitation and skills instruction for newly hired staff. Recognizing the importance of barcode infusion pump programing to reduce pump programing medication errors, Colleen worked tirelessly with the CIS Team to ensure that the IV pumps and barcode labelers worked correctly in the mock environment. If the training equipment was not functional, she developed a process to hand off this task to the unit-based educators, ensuring that every nurse at the organization received the same, consistent training on this very important safety mechanism.
Colleen is adaptable, flexible, and embraces change. She demonstrates this best during GHO week. Whether there are 80 new hires or a variety of different staff roles, she methodically makes a schedule to ensure the best orientation experience for each staff member and creates a balanced schedule that makes organized sense of what could be viewed as chaos.
Colleen also shows compassion and empathy for staff who are new to the organization by creating a new onboarding process for Registry RNs that ensures a smooth transition to the clinical units. During this process, Colleen follows up by phone or in person with each Registry nurse to ensure their shadow shift was completed and to address any additional questions or concerns, which makes the Registry nurses feel welcome at our organization. In addition, these nurses have provided feedback stating that this was the best orientation that they have received as Registry staff.
Colleen has also demonstrated excellence in guiding her wound care certification. When the Education Team was tasked with developing study plans for nurses interested in nursing specialty certification, Colleen took this to heart. She holds regularly scheduled touch points with each cohort to ensure the nurses have the resources they need, assisted with modifying the study plan, and acts as a cheerleader to keep them motivated.
She even shipped the study review books to a remote-only employee’s home address so they had access to the appropriate study materials. She is committed to encouraging individual learning and growth.
You will often hear Colleen tell her story of why she came to MLK, which includes that she came here for the technology. She embraces every opportunity to use new technology. She has spent countless hours working on aligning orientation and ongoing competencies and education through Dossier, a new online competency management system. She was also one of the first to raise her hand to work with new AI technology to enhance the orientation experience for our Travelers, reducing overall orientation time, while not compromising quality.
Colleen serves as the educational liaison for various departments. What I appreciate most about Colleen is her collaborative spirit, working with other departments to ensure their staff have the right education at the right time, delivered in the most effective way. She also utilizes her collaborative nature by serving on a variety of committees, including chairing the Peer Review Committee. She has worked on countless new product rollouts, representing Team Education.
In addition, Colleen holds herself and those around her accountable for their actions. We have all grown to love her emails titled, “just following up on this”.
I’ve watched Colleen give her all every single day and be exhausted by the end of the week. However, she is present the next week and will do it all over again without hesitation. She is committed to providing quality education to all MLKCH staff.
I would like to nominate Colleen Keith for the DAISY Nurse Educator Award. It is not one specific act, but a series of consistent examples that make her deserving of this award.
Colleen demonstrates excellence in teaching through her classroom facilitation and skills instruction for newly hired staff. Recognizing the importance of barcode infusion pump programing to reduce pump programing medication errors, Colleen worked tirelessly with the CIS Team to ensure that the IV pumps and barcode labelers worked correctly in the mock environment. If the training equipment was not functional, she developed a process to hand off this task to the unit-based educators, ensuring that every nurse at the organization received the same, consistent training on this very important safety mechanism.
Colleen is adaptable, flexible, and embraces change. She demonstrates this best during GHO week. Whether there are 80 new hires or a variety of different staff roles, she methodically makes a schedule to ensure the best orientation experience for each staff member and creates a balanced schedule that makes organized sense of what could be viewed as chaos.
Colleen also shows compassion and empathy for staff who are new to the organization by creating a new onboarding process for Registry RNs that ensures a smooth transition to the clinical units. During this process, Colleen follows up by phone or in person with each Registry nurse to ensure their shadow shift was completed and to address any additional questions or concerns, which makes the Registry nurses feel welcome at our organization. In addition, these nurses have provided feedback stating that this was the best orientation that they have received as Registry staff.
Colleen has also demonstrated excellence in guiding her wound care certification. When the Education Team was tasked with developing study plans for nurses interested in nursing specialty certification, Colleen took this to heart. She holds regularly scheduled touch points with each cohort to ensure the nurses have the resources they need, assisted with modifying the study plan, and acts as a cheerleader to keep them motivated.
She even shipped the study review books to a remote-only employee’s home address so they had access to the appropriate study materials. She is committed to encouraging individual learning and growth.
You will often hear Colleen tell her story of why she came to MLK, which includes that she came here for the technology. She embraces every opportunity to use new technology. She has spent countless hours working on aligning orientation and ongoing competencies and education through Dossier, a new online competency management system. She was also one of the first to raise her hand to work with new AI technology to enhance the orientation experience for our Travelers, reducing overall orientation time, while not compromising quality.
Colleen serves as the educational liaison for various departments. What I appreciate most about Colleen is her collaborative spirit, working with other departments to ensure their staff have the right education at the right time, delivered in the most effective way. She also utilizes her collaborative nature by serving on a variety of committees, including chairing the Peer Review Committee. She has worked on countless new product rollouts, representing Team Education.
In addition, Colleen holds herself and those around her accountable for their actions. We have all grown to love her emails titled, “just following up on this”.
I’ve watched Colleen give her all every single day and be exhausted by the end of the week. However, she is present the next week and will do it all over again without hesitation. She is committed to providing quality education to all MLKCH staff.