I would like to take this time to nominate the GCMC Emergency Department team, as a whole for this award opportunity. When I think about the DAISY Award, and the meaning behind its creation, I think about the passion that those nurses showed to Patrick and his family during his illness. I think about Patrick’s resiliency and how the love and care he was shown catered to not only him, but to his family as well. It was all-encompassing. I see a lot of that strength, resiliency, passion, and drive in our own Emergency Department team.
    
As leaders, we do the best we can to promote a positive staff experience in our department. Many days it is hard, given the volumes, census, and acuity of our patient populations, but our team perseveres. Their drive is what keeps this department afloat day after day, and every day they come back to work, we are thankful. In our minds, as leaders, happy staff means happy patients. We have worked hard to implement better staff-to-patient ratios, which allow our nursing teams to provide more thorough, patient-centered care. Giving staff a reduced workload gives them more time with their patients and an opportunity to foster relationships with them. Because of all of the hard work of our team here in the ED, we have seen improved Press Ganey scores, have increased flow of patients throughout our department and within the hospital, and have the lowest elopement rate in the Geisinger system. Despite being short-staffed, our team manages to meet the demands of our local communities and is always pushing for more/better. We have been strong in times of struggle and have stuck together through much adversity.
    
Another valuable initiative many of our team have been key stakeholders in includes Handle with Care – a Behavior Management System, which our campus began instructing back in May 2023 as a continued opportunity to keep our staff and patients safe. It teaches verbal de-escalation techniques and stresses the importance of keeping the verbal window open. It also teaches the safe handling of aggressive/agitated patients and how to place them into manual holds and/or restraints efficiently and effectively while keeping both staff and patient out of harm. This has been an integral adaptation to our department, and others – we use it often to give the volatility of the patients we encounter in the Emergency Department. We truly do feel we have had less staff injuries since its initiation.
    
Our department has also faced grief, more than we would like to admit, especially within the last few years. As a family, we have come together to support not only our own team, but the families of team members who are no longer with us. We have created an “In Memoriam” wall with plaques honoring those we have lost, located right by our trauma bay. It serves as a nice visual way to honor their memory, and we share that with their families as well, so they know they will be remembered here – always a part of our team. 
    
We also heavily promote staff participation in educational offerings and opportunities, as personal and professional growth is so important! We are fortunate enough to have quite a few members of our team passionately active in Shared Governance, SWAT, the Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner (SANE) program, and much more. We truly have some amazing future leaders on our hands! Our staff have also spearheaded opportunities to help the community, such as collecting donations for the Food Pantry and the Women’s Resource Center. We also foster relationships internally, not just with staff, but with their families. We have held Easter Egg Hunts, Trunk or Treats, an evening at Roba’s, and also department cookie exchanges during the holidays, as just a few examples. 
    
I appreciate you taking the time to listen to just a few of the MANY reasons I feel that the Emergency Department team deserves the DAISY Team Award. Resiliency, strength, perseverance, and compassion are not lost on this team. I do know – however - that our community would be lost without them.