Heather Banks
April 2024
Heather
Banks
,
BSN, RN
Medicine
Brigham and Women's Hospital
Boston
,
MA
United States

 

 

 

Heather's clinical skill, flexibility, and creativity in the midst of a busy shift enabled our new treatment plan to succeed.
I am an infectious disease fellow who also serves as the primary care physician to a lovely patient with HIV who has struggled tremendously with barriers to adherence to antiretroviral therapy over recent years. As a result, he has developed AIDS and disseminated Kaposi sarcoma, and our best efforts to treat him with standard approaches were not going well. We decided to implement the findings from new guidelines from the International AIDS Society just published two weeks ago that enable us to start a long-acting injectable antiretroviral therapy regimen (cabotegravir + rilpivirine) in patients who are not virologically suppressed. Previously, this was only possible for patients whose HIV was well-controlled and was only administered in the outpatient setting. Heather cared for my patient during the final day of his admission and worked tirelessly with me and our outpatient HIV care team to procure and administer his first dose of cabotegravir + rilpivirine. This required a specialized injection technique and was a high-stakes medication administration given the possibility of pain disincentivizing him from attending his next dosing visit in a month's time, and Heather administered it with expertise and compassion. My patient shared that it barely hurt, and that he was therefore not remotely worried about continuing with future injections. Heather's clinical skill, flexibility, and creativity in the midst of a busy shift enabled our new treatment plan to succeed. I believe it will have a significant impact on my patient's life; if we can control his HIV this way, it may, in fact, have helped to save his life. I am grateful for Heather's collaboration and professionalism and am honored to nominate her for a DAISY Award in recognition of her exceptional clinical care.