Awards Recognize Professional Achievements

In Monday’s Opening Session, the AACN Circle of Excellence Awards were bestowed to recognize Visionary Leaders.

2008 Marguerite Rodgers Kinney Award for a Distinguished Career

This award recognizes individuals who are completing or have completed an extraordinary and distinguished professional career. The recipients show consistent and exceptional contributions throughout a career that has enhanced the care of acutely and critically ill patients and their families by furthering the mission and vision of AACN. The award is named in honor of its first recipient, AACN past President Marguerite R. Kinney.

Dennis S. O’Leary
Modern Healthcare tapped him as one of the 25 most influential leaders in healthcare during the past quarter century. In many circles, Dennis S. O’Leary and The Joint Commission continue to be synonymous even though O’Leary has retired after 20 years as president. The Joint Commission didn’t merely change its name because of his transformational leadership. It embraced healthcare organizations in the United States and abroad, shifting its entire focus to address how organizations actually perform when they provide patient care. This set the stage for introducing care-related outcomes and process measures, among them cuttingedge standards for patient safety, pain management, use of patient restraints and emergency preparedness.

A nurse serving on The Joint Commission Board describes O’Leary as “steadfast in his support and recognition of nursing’s critical role in quality and patient safety.” He convened a roundtable, elevated the nurse staffi ng crisis in the public policy arena and endorsed efforts to raise nursing’s voice in every aspect of The Joint Commission’s work by supporting the creation of a Nursing Advisory Council within The Joint Commission. At a Washington, D.C., news conference in 2005, it was O’Leary who made a compelling case for why healthcare urgently needed AACN’s healthy work environment standards.

O’Leary is president emeritus of The Joint Commission. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University and a medical degree from Cornell University Medical College. After two years of internal medicine training at the University of Minnesota Hospital in Minneapolis, he completed his residency and hematology fellowship at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, N.Y. He is board certified in internal medicine and hematology.

2008 GE Healthcare-AACN Pioneering Spirit Award

This award recognizes significant contributions that influence acute and critical care nursing. Successful applicants demonstrate a far-reaching contribution that exemplifies a pioneering spirit and influences the direction of acute and critical care nursing. The contribution must be clearly defined and have a regional or national effect, must be timely and address or resolve a significant issue facing acute and critical care nursing, and must be related to the mission, vision and values of AACN. Following are this year’s recipients:

Patricia R. Ebright
What might a nurse do after 28 years as a hospital staff nurse, nurse manager and clinical nurse specialist? Here’s one possibility: Earn a doctorate and become a pioneering researcher in two critical and timely areas of inquiry that directly influence the work of acute and critical care nurses. This is what Patricia Ebright did.

Her trailblazing studies examined two critical issues in healthcare today: how healthcare providers make decisions in the context of actual care situations and how work complexity influences patient safety and quality care. Her current research funded by the National Patient Safety Foundation has uncovered a decision-making approach called “stacking” that is used by nurses to cope with variable and complex workloads. Stacking is the continuous prioritizing and reprioritizing of care delivery goals and timelines, adjusting outcomes and even abandoning some goals without adverse consequences. Stacking is invisible and dynamic. It has not been reported in the literature and nursing schools do not teach it. So it is experienced nurses who discover and use stacking as a failure-prevention strategy when they come upon the many flawed operational systems in hospitals today.

Ebright holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in nursing from the University of Cincinnati and a doctorate from Indiana University. She was a member of the first Patient Safety Leadership Fellowship class sponsored by the National Patient Safety Foundation and completed a Department of Veterans Affairs postdoctoral fellowship in informatics.

Elaine Larson
Many people know Elaine Larson as “the handwashing lady.” Her seminal research in handwashing and infection control started in the 1970s and continues to this day. With it she anticipated by several decades today’s demand for evidence-based practice in this fundamental aspect of nursing. To recognize her contributions in the field of infection prevention, in 2002 the Association of Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology endowed the Elaine Larson Lectureship. A year later the Friends of the National Institute of Nursing Research honored her with the first Pathfinder Award for her contributions to clinical research and national policy.

Larson is internationally regarded as the pre-eminent expert in scientific evidence about handwashing and as an authority on other aspects of epidemiology and infection control. She has served on the President’s Committee for Gulf War Veterans’ Illnesses and the National Institutes of Health Study Section on HIV Infection.

In addition to being editor of the American Journal of Infection Control since 1994 and serving on nine journal editorial boards, she has published more than 200 journal articles, four books and numerous book chapters. She has consulted for the World Health Organization and in countries on every continent except Antarctica.

Larson is currently associate dean for research and professor of pharmaceutical and therapeutic research at Columbia University School of Nursing. She holds a dual appointment as professor of epidemiology at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health and is director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Antimicrobial Resistance. Larson holds a bachelor’s in nursing, master’s degrees in nursing and microbiology and a doctorate in epidemiology from the University of Washington. She was a Robert Wood Johnson clinical nurse scholar at the University of Pennsylvania.

She was a Robert Wood Johnson clinical nurse scholar at the University of Pennsylvania.

Therese S. Richmond
In 1997, Therese S. Richmond started to carve out a unique and pioneering area of interdisciplinary knowledge in firearm injuries and violence. She was already nationally recognized as a neuroscience and trauma clinical nurse specialist, speaker and author. Today she is considered the leading nurse researcher in firearm injuries and violence and recognized as a mentor across professional disciplines. Most recently, she has put forward a research agenda to reduce firearm violence. All of this brings her to interdisciplinary national policy deliberations where she is usually the only nurse at the table.

At the intersection of her work in trauma care and violence, Richmond has also begun to study the outcomes of serious traumatic injury among critically ill older adults. One of the world’s foremost experts in gerontological nursing research credits her with carving a significant niche in geriatric critical care, something unheard-of five years ago.

AACN and AACN Certification Corporation have benefited from Richmond’s active volunteerism and commitment to professional organizations. She served on both boards of directors and numerous task forces and committees. She served on the Society of Critical Care Medicine Project IMPACT advisory board and received the SCCM Presidential Citation.

Richmond is currently associate professor of nursing with tenure at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing with a secondary appointment as associate professor of nursing in surgery at the university’s School of Medicine. She holds a diploma in nursing from Thomas Jefferson University School of Nursing and a bachelor’s degree in nursing from the University of Delaware along with a master’s degree from The Catholic University of America and a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing.