Cathy Hamel is a powerful resource for nursing. She will help to find a response to a difficult situation, assist with finding the solution and be a sounding board to work out answers to the problems. She is down to earth and wants us all to succeed. Cathy raises the bar with projects by making us stretch to achieve the goals and outperform them from the previous year, with the ultimate outcome of high-quality patient care. Cathy took on the added responsibility of Director of Professional Practice when the position vacated, in addition to her original Magnet Coordinator position, and she has excelled with this work.
Cathy is out Mother Hen for all nurses and takes us under her wing for mentoring, support and empowering staff to think for themselves to come up with ideas that will improve all aspects of the nursing process. She takes the extra effort to seek out and meet with us as often as her time will permit and exceeds constraints by putting in many late nights, to meet all the demands of the workload.
Cathy's attitude is always positive, smiling personality that is uplifting, encouraging to staff to care for themselves, so we can take care of each other and the patients. She understands the tremendous pressure, we nurses are under, and encourages the balance of continuous quality patient care and nursing self-care as her #1 goals. An example of her exemplary work for the motivation of staff; a patient got outside on the roof, jumped off one level and injured herself. Cathy circled the wagons with the Professional Nursing staff, planned, motivated and strategically pinpointed the problem and sought a remedy immediately after the incident. This was the correct solution and became a positive outcome in the eyes of other departments in the organization.
Cathy is changing the culture of nursing at UMC to be positive and self-driven by implementing unit based councils and bringing the voice and ideas of the bedside nurse to the table for discussion. The momentum, she exudes, is to soar all the way to the top of the organization for the betterment of patient experience and care with Nursing Councils. By using the goals of nursing practice, quality, and educational development, is to always strive for better outcomes. Cathy emulates, lives and breaths all the components of Magnet status and only wants the very best for the UMC Organization. She mirrors the CNO's vision for our organization and this is now a tangible goal.
UMC started on a journey for Magnet Certification in 2015, but thanks to Cathy's efforts the dream has become a perceptible vision that nurses understand and desire to achieve. She has educated, informed, led the charge, pushed from behind, and fought to climb the mountain of cultural change. It is leaders like Cathy, who are not only visionaries but also champions to inspire others to come on the journey. We can't imagine getting there without her.
She is a tremendous asset to UMC, The Nursing Division, Chair of NONL and Member of NNA, ANA.