Jayme
Kagarice
July 2013
Jayme
Kagarice
,
BSN, RN, CPN
Neurology Clinic
Children's Mercy Hospitals and Clinics
Kansas City
,
MO
United States

 

 

 

Jayme is an accomplished nurse who has demonstrated excellence in every task she has undertaken. I would like to highlight a few of her accomplishments since she joined the neurology clinic.

1) Jayme has been instrumental in developing several subspecialty clinics in neurology, including:

a) The Neurocutaneous Clinic: Together we created this clinic in collaboration with the division of Dermatology at Children's Mercy Hospital. Jayme's responsibilities include putting together the overall structure of the clinic, ensuring that appropriate patients are selected for the clinic, consulting with dermatology to verify the appropriateness of the selected patients, scheduling patients and maintaining contact with the families.
b) The Neurorheumatology Clinic: This is another clinic we created together in collaboration with the division of Rheumatology at Children's Mercy Hospital. In addition to organizing and maintaining this clinic, Jayme stays in close contact with all of the patients in the clinic, ensuring that all of their clinical needs are addressed. It is important to emphasize that these are all highly complex medical patients.
c) The Tourette Syndrome clinic: This clinic is currently expanding. Jayme is instrumental in designing the business proposal plan that is being submitted for this expansion. In addition, Jayme took it upon herself to put together a patient instructional kit consisting of material for both children with Tourette Syndrome and their parents.
d) The Concussion Clinic: When this project was developed Jayme took the initiative to contact the CDC to gather information on concussion. Using this material she created a teaching portfolio that she was then able to give to parents.

2) Jayme is now in the process of developing a new clinic model in the neurology clinic. The idea is to integrate nursing care into the clinic visit in such a way as to maximize physician effectiveness and nursing patient contact. This initiative that she undertook after taking it over with me is characteristic of Jayme. She takes initiative and she makes things happen. As a result of her efforts we hope to apply this model to the entire neurology clinic thereby markedly reducing wait-times for an appointment while still maintaining the same level of excellence in care.

3) About half of the patients I see have epilepsy and a large proportion of these have complex epilepsies. Jayme has rapidly learned the many drugs that we use to treat these intractable patients. This has included drugs that are difficult to obtain due to cost or unusual FDA restrictions. Jayme has developed protocols for all of these medications, so that when I need to prescribe one of these medications she has a plan of action ready to go for the parents, including financial options for expensive drugs, application processes to get the drugs approved by insurances and organizing special procedures required before some of these drugs can be prescribed. Jayme has also taken on the responsibility of all Vagal Nerve Stimulator testing and programmation.

4) Jayme is also responsible for answering all of my patient's urgent and non-urgent questions. In this role I have been able to appreciate Jayme's outstanding clinical abilities. Her medical knowledge and clinical judgment are solid and reliable and her ability to advise my patients on most issues has been a tremendous help for me. In summary, Jayme is an outstanding nurse with extraordinary clinical and human abilities. In closing, I cannot end this letter of nomination without mentioning Jayme's patience and empathy for my patients. Time and time again parents have told me how much they appreciate all that she does for them. Some of her most important care is for my patients with neurodegenerative diseases. Jayme knows these families intimately. She has advocated for them time and time again (in fact she is having me call our senator this week to see if we can get a Medicaid decision not to cover a very expensive medication for one of my patients reversed!). The mothers know they can call her and their needs will always be addressed. Jayme is truly an extraordinary nurse!