The University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Cardiac Intensive Care Unit has received the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses’ Silver Beacon Award for Excellence. This award recognizes health care organizations, like UAB Hospital, that provide exceptional care through positive patient outcomes and greater overall patient satisfaction.
The Beacon award also recognizes an organization’s ability to maintain a positive and supportive work environment for its staff with greater collaboration between colleagues and leaders, higher morale, and lower turnover.
“Receiving this award demonstrates UAB Cardiovascular Institute’s commitment to providing safe, evidence-based best practice care to our patients and their families,” said Terri Scarborough, senior director of Nursing Services. “The Beacon award recognizes excellence at the unit level and showcases our nurses’ daily commitment to their patients. We are honored to receive this national recognition.”
Units that achieve this award with a gold, silver or bronze designation serve as role models to others on their journey to excellent patient and family care.
For the Beacon award, hospital units must submit three years of data that demonstrates how they are setting the standards of excellence in recruitment and retention, education, training and mentoring, research and evidence-based practice, patient outcomes, leadership and organizational ethics, and creation of a healthy work environment. According the AACN, nurses who work in organizations and units that meet this standard for excellence report healthier work environments and express higher satisfaction with their job.
“Over the last 17 months, health care workers have really been put to the test as COVID-19 continues to sweep across the nation,” said Martin Maloney, the CICU nurse manager at UAB. “Our hospital had to quickly adapt and rearrange many departments. The CICU took on additional patient populations, along with our cardiac surgery patients, and they were still able to maintain positive patient outcomes. This speaks volumes about the phenomenal team we have, and we are really proud of each of our team members.”
UAB will hold this designation for three years. For more information about the Beacon Award for Excellence, click here.
Article provided by UAB News.