UC Medical Center Nurse Wins DAISY and Florence Nightingale Awards
Imani Rugless, RN, has been a nurse for three years. She has been working at UC Medical Center since May 2019. Imani was originally in medical school to become a physician and then quickly realized that she wanted to have more patient interaction than a physician did and switched paths to become a nurse.
Imani was UC Medical Center’s July DAISY Award Winner. She was nominated by her manager for her work in supporting new moms during the COVID-19 pandemic. Imani had noticed that the request from her new moms for information on resources ranging from diapers to personal hygiene items had greatly increased.
Imani decided to do something about this. Imani started an initiative called “Love Mom, Love Mom." Through this Facebook initiative, Imani asked for donations to create care packages to donate to Cradle Cincinnati and Every Child Succeeds. Imani collected items ranging from; diapers, wipes, formula, cleaning supplies, self-care items for mom and small toys for babies.
In just three short months, Imani collected 99 boxes of supplies, with over $1,700 to be donated to these charities to help new moms. Imani’s coworkers describe her as “super passionate, compassionate, fun and great to work with, and very focused on advancing maternal health.”
Imani’s work in 2020 was then recognized on a greater scale as winner of the individual 2021 Florence Nightingale Award, which highlights the brightest starts in the nursing field.
Imani is an asset to 3 Northwest as well as the UC Medical Center family.
Nursing Excellence Continues at West Chester Hospital
Excellence in nursing care continues to thrive at UC Health’s West Chester Hospital, the youngest hospital in history to receive Magnet® designation from the American Nurses Credentialing Center. Magnet recognition verifies that West Chester Hospital provides structures and processes that enable nursing, in collaboration with a multidisciplinary team inclusive of all staff, a voice in the decisions that improve patient care. Nurses and staff participate in organizational-wide committees and professional development activities.
By maintaining a strong focus on the achievement of positive patient outcomes, West Chester Hospital’s growth and success in providing superior, safe nursing care is demonstrated by many quality initiatives based on evidence and research. These initiatives serve to improve and enhance our excellence in patient care. Several of the most significant nurse-led projects completed in the past year focus on the areas of newborn fall prevention, enhanced skin-to-skin contact between new mothers and babies, nurse navigational programs using bedside tablets, decreased anxiety by creating a calming clinical environment, compassion fatigue reduction, patient care flow/coordination, shared governance and leadership training, use of advanced isolation equipment, medical waste regulation, predictive identification of difficult IV access, reduction of healthcare-acquired infections using standardized checklists and pre-procedural videos, and innovative mobile applications for employee mentoring.