OU School of Nursing’s 36th Annual Nightingale Award show will be held on May 8, and those honored have been announced by the committee in anticipation of the night.
10 nursing categories will be recognized, with nominees being nominated by their peers and supervisors.
Each of the 10 winners will receive a check for $1,000, a Nightingale pin and a bronze statue depicting Florence Nightingale.
The awards are named after Florence Nightingale, who is heralded as the founder of modern nursing. After nursing in the Crimean War, Nightingale would go on to establish the Nightingale Training School for Nurses.
This work and her pioneering spirit are what recipients of the Nightingale scholarship embody. The scholarship is given to OU School of Nursing students thanks to the proceeds of the NIghtingale awards and sponsors like Henry Ford Health.
Winners of the awards are selected by a committee, which is composed of 10 different nurses from 10 different areas of nursing. Kate Lionas, the events coordinator at the School of Nursing, delves into the different hospital systems represented.
“They come from 10 different hospital systems, they’re not all from one system,” Lionas said. “There’s one from Henry Ford Health, one from Ascension, Corewell, Oakland County Health Division. They make up the Nightingale Review Committee.”
The diversity in work and professional background is set for the committee’s goal of credibility. This selected group then selects nominations.
“They read every single nomination. This year we had 149,” Lionas said. “They read every single one, and then they grade it, with medical grades.”
The medical grade scale refers to the system of scoring on a number scale. Averages are taken for each nomination, and then the highest will be awarded as the winner. In the past, the difference between the winner and runner-up has been mere decimal points.
“Sometimes, between the winner and runner-up, it’s like 0.1-0.2 away,” Lionas said.
Not all categories come down to numbers this close. The amount of nominations varies by category.
“Some categories have four to six nominations, others have forty,” Lionas said. “Staff nurse is a huge category. A lot of people nominate staff nurses. You can understand that, they are the ones who are at the bed [of patients]. You want to reward them and acknowledge the daily work they do with patients.”
The categories with “four to six” patients are different.
“Nursing research is a lot less known,” Lionas said. “That’s a smaller category, you’ve have to sort of know somebody.”
Other categories are more deeply rooted in the OU community than others.
Dr. Ashlee Barnes will be receiving the Distinguished Alumni Award at the show, having earned her Bachelor of Science in Nursing degree, Master of Science in Nursing Education degree and Post-Master’s Certification in Family Nurse Practitioner from OU.
Barnes has been a board-certified Family Nurse Practitioner since 2014 and serves as a nursing educator at the University of Detroit Mercy, as well as being a researcher. She takes an interest in researching how utilizing mindfulness can improve the mental health of higher education students.
Barnes and nine others will receive their awards on May 8 in the Oakland Center’s ballrooms.
