Brittany has been in Nursing Professional Development for over 3 years and has excelled as a role model, a mentor, and leader for her NPD peers and staff.  During her tenure as an NPD Practitioner, Brittany has increased the support and focus on direct care leader development (charge nurses, shift coordinators, & nurse managers). One of her performance goals aimed to impact Charge Nurse satisfaction and improve overall retention of charge nurses. Brittany focused on retention strategies and collaborated with existing charge nurses to ensure that she implemented interventions that were meaningful to the population she was aiming to impact. Retention strategies implemented by Brittany included reviving the reoccurring charge nurse meetings, creating a frontline leader class focused on initial and ongoing charge nurse development, and support for the acquisition of online learning for new and existing charge nurses. As a result of these strategies, Brittany was able to reduce charge nurse turnover by 4% (29.4% to 25.4%) and showed her strengths in building collaborative partnerships with those team members she serves.
 
Brittany serves as the mentor for shared decision-making as well. Her focus on increasing the engagement of staff in caucus groups, committees, and nursing congress has been powerful in influencing our RN engagement autonomy scores. As an advocate for research, Brittany has also served as the primary investigator/researcher for her research on measuring shared governance within our organization. Her passion to elevate the power of nursing influence on healthcare resonates through the deep connections she has formed with new managers, charge nurses, and all those who participate in shared decision making. Because of her commitment to shared decision-making, her research in the measurement of shared governance has sparked actionable interventions to improve the strength of our nursing workforce governance structure. Although these interventions are in progress, they focus on improvement in communication and development of a communication structure for the internal shared decision-making groups within our organization. 
 
Additionally, Brittany continues to promote and recognize the work of exceptional direct care nurses. Brittany not only mentored our most recent Nursing Congress Chair, Jill Beierle, a UofL Hospital MICU RN of 30 years. Brittany was able to help recruit and promote her succession planning into NPD by supporting her to create a plan to go back to school, where Jill successfully completed her BSN AND achieved her first specialty certification as a CCRN. Jill commonly declares Brittany to be her “wing-woman” because she feels she would have never done any of those career milestones without the support and encouragement of Brittany.  
 
As evidence of her flexibility and adaptability, Brittany was able to support the manuscript submission for shared governance research and several abstract submissions prior to her maternity leave. Once she returned from leave, she submitted her NPDP portfolio and co-presented at a virtual conference on her nursing research with shared governance. Regardless of circumstance, Brittany continues to prioritize her own professional development and prioritizes those opportunities to strengthen her commitment to NPD which is utilized to benefit all our direct care nurse leaders.
 
Brittany’s calming approach to conflict resolution and crucial conversations serves her well as a mentor, coach, and guide for all those she interacts with. She is an effective communicator focusing on solutions-based thinking. She frequently guides staff on the differences between “venting” which is self or problem-focused and “gossip” which involves other people. She avoids engaging in gossip and encourages her colleagues (staff and leaders) to do the same. She guides those colleagues to consider alternative perspectives and positive intent while focusing on the core issue being explored. I have seen many examples of this, including her work with diffusing conversations by redirecting the topic toward the work that needed to get done and away from the person who did not do the work. She role models this for others to ensure her scope of influence persists in the culture of her team and all that she works with. Brittany is truly an amazing human, colleague, mother, nurse, and friend. She is truly deserving of this honor!

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Brittany has been a mentor within the concepts of shared governance as well as an advocate for charge nurse empowerment for myself and many others. Within the practice of growing shared governance, she has been a vital catalyst for the growth the critical care service line has seen over the past year. In the process of revitalizing the ICU Caucus at ULH she was an integral part of our ability to get the charter finalized, representatives voted in, and ensure meeting structures were productive. She also serves as a sounding board to take in barriers and help to find solutions or partnerships to combat the barriers. 

Additionally, Brittany encouraged me and a team to submit for a shared governance summit. She then worked with us every step of the way to ensure our success. On the day of our conference, she was there to cheer us on, help coordinate AV set up, and did not hesitate to climb under the table to fix a laptop cord that came unsecured while we were starting our presentation.

With Brittany's help, I have grown tremendously over the past year, and as I step into the role of ULH Nursing Congress Chair, I have no doubt that I would not be here in my career journey without Brittany's support and mentorship.