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I’ve Been Nominated for the Best of Nursing Awards

I’ve Been Nominated for the Best of Nursing Awards!

December 13, 2024

I am incredibly excited to announce that I’ve been nominated for two Best of Nursing Awards.

These awards are given out as part of an annual initiative by Nurse.org to “recognize and celebrate dedication and excellence in the nursing industry in the U.S.”

And the best part is, all Nursing Awards finalists are nominated by the nursing community.

This year, I’ve been nominated in the Nurse Leader and Nurse Innovation categories, but this is truly a tribute to pioneering Awake and Walking ICU nurses like Polly Bailey, Louise Bezdjian, and all the nurses who dare to challenge the status quo, research this subject, and fight to bring evidence-based practices to their patients.

An advocate of Awake and Walking ICUs being nominated for these awards is amazing, as it brings validation and recognition to all the ICU Revolutionists who have been leading the humanization of critical care medicine.

And being nominated for Best Nurse Leader reinforces the fact that nurses are leaders who can influence ICU culture and affect change when it comes to standard of care in medicine.

All things considered, these nominations reflect the power of nurses to make life-saving changes in the ICU, and the world at large.

If you’d like to show your support, you can cast your vote here from now through December 31st.

And keep in mind that anyone can vote – not just nurses, and you can vote in both categories for which I’ve been nominated!

About the Author, Kali Dayton

Kali Dayton, DNP, AGACNP, is a critical care nurse practitioner, host of the Walking Home From The ICU and Walking You Through The ICU podcasts, and critical care outcomes consultant. She is dedicated to creating Awake and Walking ICUs by ensuring ICU sedation and mobility practices are aligned with current research. She works with ICU teams internationally to transform patient outcomes through early mobility and management of delirium in the ICU.

Over the last few years I have become aware of the PICS (post-intensive care syndrome) condition and the very serious negative impact that it has on our ICU survivors. I have become much more aware of the potential negative impact of anxiety, depression, PTSD and cognitive dysfunction. Many patients whom we consider saves in the sense they leave the ICU alive have many issues that most people would consider far from a successful experience. Their lives are often dramatically changed in a very negative fashion.

I am a professor of medicine and have been an ICU director for over forty years. What I find very disturbing in my own experience and that of many other intensivists is that this outcome is generally considered acceptable; the patient survived and will get better with time. We have little access to these patients and almost zero information about their condition unless they are unfortunate enough to return to our ICUs. Very few of us have a PICS clinic where we would have a chance to better understand the challenges that some of our patients encounter, and there are very few systems in place to provide feedback to us as ICU clinicians. Therefore, we are blissfully ignorant of the many challenges that a substantial number of our survivors encounter. This is a major problem. The vast majority of ICU survivors and their families will experience cognitive, emotional and physical symptoms which often have devastating impacts on their lives. At this time, with PICS clinics being a rarity, there is no reasonable mechanism for intensivists to have a solid perspective on the frequency and severity of this condition.

How patients and their families are treated in the ICU often has a major impact on how the patient and families survive post discharge. It is generally agreed that most sedation infusions, particularly benzodiazepines, frequently have higher incidences of delirium and post-discharge dysfunction. There are a few hospitals in this country where sedative infusions are rarely used and the incidence of the complications described above are dramatically decreased. I have visited one of these hospitals and was amazed to see how effectively patients on maximum ventilator support can be managed, even walking without sedative infusions. In an effort to explore this treatment option in greater detail I have identified Kali Dayton. She is a nurse practitioner who has practiced in this Awake and Walking ICU for many years and is an amazing source of information on this topic. After extensive discussion with many colleagues, administration and many others, and reviewing the major potential benefits of the program for our patients, we have decided to introduce this program into our hospital.

Peter J. Murphy, MD, FCCP, MRCPI, BSc

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