President of the Cayman Islands Nursing Association Rebekah Brooks has been chosen as the 2012 recipient of the Eloise Reid Award for Nursing Excellence.
Ms Brooks, who works at the Children’s Clinic and formerly worked as an intensive care unit nurse at the Cayman Islands Hospital in George Town, was awarded the accolade at an opening reception for the annual national nursing conference held in Cayman last week.
Ms Brooks has spent most of her career as a nurse working in the Cayman Islands. She became a nurse 14 years ago and has been in Cayman for 12 years, working initially at the Chrissie Tomlinson Memorial Hospital before moving to the Cayman Islands Hospital and then into private practice at the Children’s Clinic.
“It’s a great privilege to be awarded the Eloise Reid Award for Nursing Excellence. She’s a great leader,” Ms Brooks said.
The nursing award is named after the former CEO of the Health Services Authority, Eloise Reid, who was among the panel that picked Ms Brooks.
Secretary of the Cayman Islands Nursing Association Jeanette Verhoeven pointed out that although Ms Brooks is obviously widely known to the nursing community in Cayman due to her position as president of the nursing association, the association had no role in choosing the winning nominee. “It’s a totally separate process that is done through the nursing staff and not through the association,” Ms Verhoeven said. Each year, nursing staff, as well as patients and other members of the public nominate registered nurses from across the public and private sector who have demonstrated excellence in the application of the standards for nursing practice and code of ethics and who have made outstanding contributions to the nursing profession in clinical practice.
The Awards Selection Committee chooses the winner from the nominees. This year, there were seven candidates for the Eloise Reid Award. The award was launched five years ago and it is handed out each year at the annual National Nursing Conference during Nurses Week.
Don’t forget the past
The keynote speaker at the annual nursing conference, which is now in its seventh year, was Karen Stefaniak, adjunct assistant professor at the University of Kentucky College of Nursing.
Ms Stefaniak urged the nurses gathered at the conference at the Grand Cayman Marriott Beach Resort not to forget their history and to learn from it, even as the nursing industry continues to try to redefine its role.
“For the past 150 years, we have been trying in the field of nursing to define ourselves and we keep redefining ourselves. Maybe we are not doing ourselves justice by continually changing who we are without thinking about who we have been,” she said.
As well as the changing role of women in society over the years, one of the major impacts on the nursing community has been the shifting of nursing training from hospitals into universities, said Ms Stefaniak, who worked as a nurse for 48 years.
And while in the past, nursing was a distinct practice from the work of doctors and social workers and other medical professionals, now there are all those different disciplines they are trying to learn how to work together. “In the past, we were all very insular, we had a kind of silo mentality, but that will not work anymore – patients are too sick and health care is too complex. We must work together,” Ms Stafaniak said.
As well as their clinical work, nurses must also be advocates for patients, she continued, just as Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing profession, once was.
This year’s conference included a wide range of topics, including pain management, cardiovascular disease in women, head injury management, care of pre-term infants, nursing management, hyperbaric therapy beyond diving, asthma care, prevention of medical errors, sleep disorders, colostomy care, health insurance, care of the dying and treatment of anaphylaxis, among many others.
This year, there were seven candidates for the Eloise Reid Award.
Related Videos
