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I’ve Been Nominated for the Best of Nursing Awards

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

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.

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ICU testimonialI stumbled upon Kali’s podcast midway through my anesthesia critical care fellowship in February 2021. At our institution, I got the impression that patients in the ICU either got better on their own or had a prolonged and complicated course to LTAC or death. In her podcast, Kali explained that LTAC was rarely the outcome for patients in the Awake and Walking ICU in Salt Lake City.

Their ICU survivors hardly ever got trached, PEGed, or sent to LTAC, and literally walked out of the hospital in condition as close to their previous health as they could be. Although the concept of using no sedation on ventilated patients was completely foreign to me, it made sense based on what I had read in the literature. I devoured all of the episodes from the beginning, many of them bringing tears and regret for my ignorance, followed by inspiration and hope in later episodes. Listening to her podcast has been one of the most profound experiences in my short, eight-year career in medicine.

After discovering the no sedation, early mobility practice at the Awake and Walking ICU, my focus shifted to bringing it to my own institution. I visited Salt Lake City in March to witness it with my own eyes. Since then, I’ve been in touch closely with Kali and Louise to learn the practical approaches to sedation wean and sedation avoidance for newly intubated patients in the ICU.

Mikita Fuchita, MD
Colorado, USA

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