Our Very first DAISY Nurse Leader Award Winner: Samantha Corkum
Congratulations to the very first DAISY Nurse Leader Award winner: Samantha Corkum, MSN, RN, RNC-NIC, Neonatal Program Coordinator. She works in the NICU.
The award was presented to Samantha during Nurses Week.
The DAISY (Diseases Attacking the Immune SYstem) Award is an international recognition program that honors and celebrates the skillful, compassionate care nurses provide every day. The DAISY Foundation was established by the family of J. Patrick Barnes after he died from complications of an auto-immune disease in 1999. During his hospitalization, they deeply appreciated the care and compassion shown to Patrick and his entire family. When he died, they felt compelled to say “thank you” to nurses in a very public way.
The DAISY Nurse Leader Award recognizes nurses who are extraordinary in the impact they have on compassionate patient care. Honorees can be any nurse leader who impacts patient care directly including supervisors, managers, educators, or nurses who specialize in case management, informatics, or patient flow.
This Nurse Leader impacts staff and/or the patient care they manage by:
- Role modeling extraordinary behavior
- Creating an environment where attributes of trust, compassion, mutual respect, continued professional development, and ethical behavior are modeled and supported
- Motivating staff with a shared vision and enthusiasm to achieve better outcomes for themselves and for their patients
- Promoting and enhancing the image of nursing within the organization, the community, and the profession
Here's what her nominator wrote when submitting Samantha for the award:
"2022 was probably one of the most trying years in our NICU. We had a record average daily census and acuity, a significant transition of our medical and nursing leadership, numerous new hires to the unit, and to top it off, our designation survey to remain a Level IV NICU and serve our tiniest Texans at our very best.
"But the chaos of the year could not have been managed without Samantha. As our Neonatal Program Coordinator, she led a quality team to provide real-time feedback on what worked and what needed to be done to improve the outcomes of our babies and our unit. She was a trusted advisor to help the new medical and nursing directors and nursing managers settle into their roles. She led orientation sessions for our new hires and regularly checked in on them to make sure they were doing okay when chaos reigned all around them. Burnout is real and she worked tirelessly to help combat it. And she led a designation team for us to have a flawless survey, allowing us to provide care at our utmost potential.
“Every baby that has graduated from our NICU has been impacted by Samantha. Every person working in the NICU has been impacted by Samantha. She has created an environment where trust, compassion, respect, and continued personal and professional development can be attainable. She is the leader all units should strive to have and I, like others, consider ourselves fortunate to have her battling for us, our babies, and our families. I struggle to come up with the right words to describe how invaluable she is to the NICU, but I hope I do her justice in what I have said as she is highly deserving of the Nurse Leadership Daisy Award. ”
Pictured: Hevil Shah, M.D, Samantha Corkum, Deborah Boudreaux, Brittany McLaughlin