Employee of the Month – Rachael McFarland
Congratulations to Rachael McFarland on being named as an Employee of the Month. Rachael is a CNA that primarily works on the CCU. Thank you so much for your hard work, Rachael! Your hard work is making Med Center Health a better and safer place for our community! The following is Rachael’s nomination from a co-worker.
Rachael is a fantastic addition to the CCU team and the MCH family. By far, she is one of the hardest workers in our organization. She goes out of her way to ensure that every patient and nurse in CCU is taken care of, and her name comes up on nearly every patient or staff round that occurs.
Most often, Rachael works in CCU stepdown. On almost every shift, she ensures that all eight patients are bathed (like a good, true bath) and weighed before 0700. In her downtime, she stocks all supplies in ICCU and CCU and makes sure her nurses can do their jobs more efficiently by being proactive with patient and staff needs. There have also been three separate patient family members in the last six months that would only leave to go home when Rachael was working. These families preferred a family member be present 24/7, but when that could not happen they would take their breaks from the hospital on shifts that Rachael was caring for their loved one. I asked each of them why they felt so comfortable with Rachael, and, to summarize the three separate answers, Rachael is an advocate for her patients, cares for the patient like it’s her own family member, and always puts the needs of those around her ahead of her own. Additionally, we typically expect active involvement in quality measures to come from nurses. However, in this case, Rachael is very invested and active in ensuring CCU provides top notch quality care. She has been an active participant in CAUTI, CLABSI, and Pressure Injury prevention in CCU. I truly believe that she single handedly helps improve my quality measures through her persistence with CHG bathing, turning and repositioning, and encouragement of early mobility when possible. To close, we often see that staff pull back just a bit from their normal routine when floated out to other units. Rachael is an exception to this rule. No matter where she goes, she brings this same intensity. After floating to other departments, I often get asked “Can I have Rachael?” or “Where do I get a Rachael?” and my response is always the same, absolutely not, and when I figure that out I’ll let you know, because I want more people just like her! – Jordan Keen
