Katie recently served as the nursing Team Lead on a busy Sunday at Town Center that saw multiple emergencies and high-acuity patients. Throughout it all, she remained calm and focused. She worked collaboratively with our Lead Physician and the Transfer Center to safely move multiple patients in need of a higher level of care. Some of these included a patient with altered mental status and respiratory depression who had to be flown to Scottish Rite by helicopter, a patient in anaphylaxis, a baby with stridor at rest, a child who had fallen from a height of ten feet with an obvious deformity, a head injury with loss of consciousness, and a child with chronic medical issues who was hypothermic and experiencing seizures.

At one point, we had four active emergencies with only four staff nurses in the building. Somehow, Katie was able to stabilize the sickest patients and keep our urgent care running as efficiently as possible by delegating tasks and constantly reassessing which patients were in the greatest need of care with limited staff. She did all of this while precepting a nurse still on orientation.

Not once during this shift did I hear her complain. She even checked in with individual staff members toward the end of the day to ensure everyone had been able to take a break, as it had been so busy she wasn’t sure everyone had taken lunch. I cannot think of anyone who better exemplifies the Children’s vision to be a unified pediatric system that does everything possible to make anything possible for kids.