By Staff Reports
(Honolulu) – The American Association of Critical-Care Nurses (AACN) has honored The Queen’s Medical Center’s Eileen D. U. Wong, RN, BSN, CCRN, with its 2015 Circle of Excellence Award.
Wong is a Registered Nurse at The Queen’s Medical Center, where she has been employed for 22 years. Her duties in the Surgical Intensive Care Unit (SICU) include providing patient care with attention to the patient’s physical, emotional, and social needs. She includes the family at all steps and is a tireless patient advocate.
As SICU Unit Council chair for the past 3 years, Wong has had her finger on the pulse of patient satisfaction scores for her unit. She has helped to initiate the “Buddy System” for safe patient care, with every patient being monitored 24/7 by the primary nurse or a designated nurse buddy. Wong has been the co-leader for implementing the DAISY award, a hospital-wide award program for nurses giving direct patient care. She has championed nominating nurses who have gone on to become members of the Circle of Excellence themselves.
Wong has also been instrumental over the past 2 years in her unit’s journey to the Beacon award, an award given to individual hospital nursing units by AACN and is an equivalent to the Magnet Award, an award of nursing excellence. She maintained a steady progress and arranged for all the needed resources to complete the submission of the Beacon award application in September of 2014. In March, The Queen’s Medical Center SICU received the first Beacon award in the state of Hawaii.
The Circle of Excellence award is bestowed annually to up to 25 outstanding nurses nationwide for achieving excellent outcomes in the care of acutely and critically ill patients and their families. Wong is the fourth Queen’s nurse to receive this award.
This year’s 25 honorees will be recognized at AACN’s National Teaching Institute & Critical Care Exposition in San Diego, May 18-21.
Criteria used to evaluate the Circle of Excellence Award candidates include relentless promotion of patient-driven excellence; communication skills; true collaboration; effective decision making; meaningful recognition of others; ability to transform thinking, structures and processes; and ability to address challenges and remove barriers to excellent patient care and achieve visible results through leadership.
AACN’s Circle of Excellence Awards align with the association’s mission of creating a healthcare system driven by the needs of patients and their families in which acute and critical care nurses make their optimal contribution.
Awardees receive a plaque and a $1,000 honorarium and become members of the Circle of Excellence Society.