Cherokee Inspired Comfort Award

The Cherokee Inspired Comfort Award is an award that recognizes registered nurses and other non-physician, clinical, health care professionals who work directly with patients in the United States. The award invites anyone to nominate a health care professional for exceptional service, sacrifice or innovation. The award is named after Cherokee Uniforms, a designer, manufacturer and distributor of uniforms, scrubs and lab coats worn by health care, dental and veterinary professionals internationally.

History

Cherokee Uniforms created the award in 2003 to increase national awareness of health care professionals who serve patients, co-workers and communities in ways that would be considered exceptional by the general public and health care industry. In its inaugural year, the award was bestowed on ten health care professionals: a nurse practitioner and nine registered nurses. In 2003, 526 persons were nominated. In 2007, 1,019 persons were nominated. Since its inception in 2003, 5,400 health care professionals and student nurses have been nominated for the award. All of the award’s recipients are described on [1].

Notable recipients

• 2003 - Mona Counts, PhD, CRNP, FNAP, FAANP, a recipient of the inaugural 2003 Cherokee Inspired Comfort Award, was honored for taking out a second mortgage on her home to fund the creation of a clinic (the Mt. Morris Primary Care Clinic) to serve the general health care needs of the 5,000 Appalachian residents in southwestern Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Nurse practitioners provide most of the health care services at the rural clinic under the direction of Counts, a nurse practitioner and the Elouise Ross Eberly Professor of Nursing at the Pennsylvania State University School of Nursing.² In July 2004, Reader’s Digest profiled Counts as an “Everyday Hero”, which features “ordinary citizens who perform extraordinary acts at great personal risk or sacrifice.”³ In 2004, Counts was elected to serve a two-year term as President-Elect of the American Academy of Nurse Practitioners, from 2005 through 2007. Counts was featured in A Nurse I Am, a two-film project, produced in 2006 for nurses and nursing students, funded by Cherokee Uniforms. More at [2] (Cherokee Inspired Comfort Award website)

• 2003 - Mandy Larson, RN, a recipient of the 2003 Cherokee Inspired Comfort Award, nearly lost her life as a Good Samaritan. Following her shift as a clinical nurse specialist in the neonatal intensive care unit at Medical University of South Carolina’s Children’s Hospital, Larson was visiting her husband at the hospital-based ambulance service when an accident occurred nearby. When they ran to help, the uninjured motorist aimed a handgun at Larson and fired five times. Bullets hit her in the hip, arm and shoulder. She lost two liters of blood and credited her husband, an EMT, with saving her life. A hospital flight nurse and a police officer died of gunshot wounds. Following numerous surgeries, she returned to work.

• 2004 - Susan Fleming, RN, was a recipient of a 2004 Cherokee Inspired Comfort Award. After four years as a nursing aide, Fleming applied to nursing school. A prosthesis took the place of her left hand and allowed her to accomplish most tasks without assistance. Susan is earning a master’s degree in nursing while working as a nurse in the Pacific Northwest. Susan advocates for nurses with disabilities as a board member of the non-profit ExceptionalNurse.com. More at [3]. (Organization's website)

• 2005 - Michelle Hokanson, was studying to become a nurse when she received a Grand Prize in the 2005 Cherokee Inspired Comfort Award for an honor’s project at Montgomery College, in Conroe, Texas. After learning that all cultures do not express pain in the same manner, she developed two pain-assessment scales to help nurses accurately understand and manage patients’ pain: one for Hispanic females, another for African-American males. The scale uses photographs of people whose body language expresses physical pain. The project received the college’s top award, and Hokanson maintained a 4.0 GPA in nursing courses while also working full-time at a local hospital and volunteered in a hospice.

• 2006 - Gerald Flint, LVN II, EMT, COMT, was the Grand Prize winner in the Licensed Practical Nurse/ Licensed Vocational Nurse category of the 2006 Cherokee Inspired Comfort Award. Immediately following a mission in Iraq where he was injured, Flint led an international team of medical volunteers to assist the tsunami victims of Thailand and Sri Lanka. He led multiple other volunteer operations in 2005 using his own funds and over 1,500 hours of time. More at [4]. (Cherokee Inspired Comfort Award website)

About the Award

The award is offered annually. Nominations are submitted by entering the names and occupational-specific information about the nominee into the award-nomination process via electronic or paper nomination forms which are hosted on [5] (the award’s website). The nomination period is from March 1 through May 31, and recipients are announced on the award’s website and in the U.S. media in late September.¹

The award has five nomination categories: advanced practice nurses, registered nurses, licensed vocational nurses/ licensed practical nurses, students who are enrolled in schools of nursing, and other non-physician, clinical, health care professionals who work directly with patients.

Recipients may be chosen in each nomination category. The number of recipients chosen in a given year depends on the quality of nominations that are submitted. In 2006, there were eleven recipients: two advanced practice nurses, four registered nurses, two licensed vocational nurses/ licensed practical nurses, two nursing students, and one non-physician health care professional. There are three levels of prize winners: grand prize winners, top national winners and national winners. Typically, there is one grand prize winner and one top national winner in each nomination category. The number of national winners in each category depends on the quality of the nominations received.

Award Features

Recipients of each year’s Cherokee Inspired Comfort Award appear in the following year’s calendar, distributed to schools of nursing, professional associations and health care employers, including hospitals and skilled nursing facilities. The calendars also are distributed through retailers who sell health care uniforms. Calendars include a photography portrait of each of the preceding year’s recipients, an inspirational quotation, and health care professional awareness and recognition days and weeks. Calendars are free of charge.

Cherokee promotes the recipients of the Cherokee Inspired Comfort Award in the national media, to media serving the health care professions, and to media serving each recipient’s geographic areas. Media coverage of the awards has appeared in Nurseweek, Nursing Spectrum, Advance For Nurses, Advance For LPNs, Advance For Nurse Practitioners, Advance For Physical Therapists and Physical Therapy Assistants, the Baltimore Sun, and Reader’s Digest. Health care associations, state and specialty nurses associations, and associations of other kinds of professional and educational associations promote the award to members in member communications vehicles and on their websites.

Judging Process

A panel of nurse leaders, Cherokee management personnel, and former award recipients choose recipients who best meet the program’s key requirements of exceptional service, sacrifice and innovation.

Prizes

The grand prize winner in each nomination category receives an all-expense-paid Caribbean cruise for two. Additional winners in each category receive all-expense-paid trips to a medical conference of each winner’s choice, an annual membership to their preferred clinical association and a donation of $500 to the nonprofit organization of their choice.

Every award winner receives a trophy, Cherokee medical uniforms and Rockers Footwear worth more than $1,000 (if purchased from a retailer), a gold Cherokee Inspired Comfort Award insignia pin, and a profile in a nationally distributed calendar. Those who nominate the grand prize winner in each category receive Cherokee medical uniforms and a donation of $500 to the nonprofit organization of their choice.

A NURSE I AM

An Inspirational Film

Alarmed at the disturbing number of nurses leaving the profession within their first few years in practice, Cherokee Uniforms provided a grant to Emmy Award and Peabody Award-winning director David Hoffman to create a film for nurses and nursing students that would encourage, inspire and instruct. Hoffman completed two films with the same title: A Nurse I Am.⁴ One, a 32-minute educational film, features four former recipients of the Cherokee Inspired Comfort Award as role models who adhere to accepted nursing practices and who exhibit compassion and commitment toward patients. Read about Hoffman’s motivation behind making the film at [6]. The film follows the nurses as they treat patients and provide recommendations on how to survive and succeed in the nursing profession.

The educational version of the film was created as a tool for instructors to use in classrooms in schools of nursing and includes a classroom discussion guide for instructors. This version of the film received endorsements from the Ohio Nurses Association, the Association of Pediatric Oncology Nurses, the American Assembly for Men in Nursing, Nurses House, Inc., and the American Academy of Nurse Practitioners. (The endorsements are printed on the cover insert of the DVD containing only the educational version.) More than 100 schools of nursing in the U.S. use the educational version of the film as part of their teaching curricula. These include the schools of nursing at Yale University, Michigan State University, Indiana State University, University of Texas, North Dakota State University, New Mexico State University, Seattle Pacific University, University of Alabama, University of Alaska, and University of Washington. A comprehensive list is at [7] (film website). A second film, a 62-minute documentary with the same title, follows the personal and professional lives of three of the nurses featured in the educational version. The documentary reveals what motivates these nurses to pursue excellence despite difficult challenges and shows how these nurses maintain personal balance within careers filled with high pressure and disappointments. Watch a 7-minute clip of the film on You Tube [8]. More about the film at [9] (film’s website).

A NURSE I AM Scholarship

Cherokee Uniforms established the A Nurse I Am Scholarship Program in 2006, and the first 10 winners were awarded $2,000 checks in 2007. Applicants were required to watch either version of the film A Nurse I Am and to submit an essay describing what the film meant to them.

Footnotes

¹Cherokee Inspired Comfort Award website ([10]). Retrieved 2007-07-04.
²Pennsylvania State University College of Health & Human Development website (http://www.hhdev.psu.edu/nurs/faculty/counts.html). Retrieved 2007-07-24
³Reader’s Digest, July 2004
⁴A Nurse I Am website [11]. Retrieved 2007-07-24

References

• Cherokee Inspired Comfort Award website [12]. Retrieved 2007-07-04
• Pennsylvania State University College of Health & Human Development website (http://www.hhdev.psu.edu/nurs/faculty/counts.html). Retrieved 2007-07-24
• Reader’s Digest, July 2004
• A Nurse I Am website ([www.anurseiam.com]). Retrieved 2007-07-24
• Medical University of South Carolina website news story [13]
• Article "Welcome to the New World" on website of MinorityNurse.com [14]